An obituary may well be the hardest thing to write. It has to be composed in a hurry during a period of bereavement. Those closest to the person who died may not be in a condition to write it. The ...

Re “Why I Write My Obituary Every Year,” by Kelly McMasters (Opinion guest essay, Sept. 29): I felt so connected to Ms. McMasters’s essay. Like her, I started this ritual when I was a child. Back then ...

She will not be missed, thus reads the concluding sentence in one of the most jaw-dropping obituaries we've ever read. The obituary for Kathleen Dehmlow starts innocently enough, that she was born ...

When most people think of death notices, they imagine dry, formulaic paragraphs. These seem to be written by an undertaker with a thesaurus. But, there’s a hidden world that sees this as a form of ...

“I wanted to do right by their families, and leave a historical record ensuring that their full lives, and not just their passing, were recorded and remembered.” In June, the writer Lore Segal, who ...

“Well,” the wife said, “let me help you out. I’ll tell you what not to write. Do not say I was the life of the party, that my smile lit up a room, or that I never met a stranger. Those phrases, while ...