Obituaries and notices

On a real funeral home's website this is the busiest page there is. It carries a notice for every family currently being looked after, each with the times of the viewing and the service, the address of the church or the chapel, whether everybody is welcome at the graveside or only the family, and where to send flowers or give instead. Under each one there is a condolence book that anybody can sign, which stays open long after the funeral and which families read for years.

It is also the page that carries the practical detail people ring at nine in the evening to ask for: what time on the day, which entrance, and whether the children are expected.

There is none of that here, and there never will be. Putting an invented person on this page — a name, a face, a date of death, a widow, a message from a neighbour — is the one thing this demonstration will not do, and it is not a close decision. So what follows is the template with nobody in it: the shape, the fields and the layout, and a dash where the name goes.

An obituary has two jobs and they pull in different directions. It tells people the practical things — who has died, when, and where to be — and it says who the person was, to somebody who may only have known one part of them. The first job is a form. The second one is not, and it is the reason these are worth writing rather than filling in.

The advice that helps most is to stop trying to summarise a life and write down one true specific thing instead. What she was like on the telephone. The thing he always said in the car. What she cooked when somebody was ill. Two lines of that will do more than a paragraph of devoted husband, loving father, will be sadly missed — which is true of nearly everybody and therefore describes no one.

Use the name they were actually called. Say the job they actually did rather than the title on the pension letter. Get the spellings of the living right, and read the list of survivors out to somebody else before it goes anywhere, because a name left out of that list is remembered at family gatherings for thirty years.

It will be written badly, at midnight, by somebody who has not slept, and it will usually be the best thing anybody says all week. That is the ordinary way of it. Write it in your own words, read it aloud once, and let it be plain.

We will help with it if you want help. We will check the details, get it to the newspaper before its deadline and put it up here the same day — and we will not improve it into something nobody in the family recognises.

Length is the one place where the two formats genuinely differ. A newspaper charges by the line, so the printed notice is where families cut, and cut hard. Online it costs nothing at all, which is why almost everybody now does both: the short one in print with the times in it, and the long one on the funeral home's website where there is room to say something.