Famous Last Words: Relationship, Status, Memory, and the Pervasive Power of Obituaries 
Mary Kate Gorman, University of Wyoming 
Undergraduate Thesis 
Faculty Mentor: Michael Edson 
May 14, 2020 
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Introduction 
Saint Benedict said that we should all “Keep death daily before [our] eyes.” This might 
seem to be macabre advice, always to be fixated on the presence of death. But I’ve always read 
this idea of keeping death before you as an encouragement not to let death sneak up behind you 
before you are done living. If we keep the possibility of death on our minds, does it encourage us 
to live so that when we arrive at death’s door, we are ready to walk in? Maybe that was my 
motivation for pursuing this project about obituaries. If I understood the genre I would also have 
a greater insight into how I should be living. It certainly grew out of my own experiences with 
death and reading obituaries. The first ones I encountered were the ones that my mom penned for 
her parents when they died. My grandpa’s read, “True wealth, as far as he was concerned, could 
be measured in terms of grandkids, so they all have their own memories of Grandpa's wild rides, 
humor, and lessons. They also consumed many cups of his special (mostly sugar and canned 
milk) coffee or tea.” About three years later, my grandma died and her obituary noted that “She 
wrote letters, notes and cards right up to the end of her life, and those who received her letters 
consider them treasures, as she was a master of that dying art.” I couldn’t fathom that this was 
the last thing provided about their time on this earth. There were personal touches in these 
certainly, but I thought these brief overviews couldn’t possibly be enough. They were so much 
more than special cups of coffee and letters. Looking back, I don’t know that anything would 
have been enough, but it was fascinating to me that it all came down to this document. Later in 
my life, I would read obituaries for other family members and wondered why their more 
questionable actions had been left out. Obituaries as a genre are able to say too much and not 
enough all at once. They often dismiss unpleasant details or habits in favor of general praise, and 
they fall short of capturing the true essence of an individual.  
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My goals in this project are to examine how the genre functions in our society and what 
the implications are for the way we make sense of the world. I also want to analyze what 
happens when readers perceive the obituary to misfire or malfunction. Lastly, I wanted to make 
sense of what the genre tells us about how we evaluate people. What makes obituaries a valid 
text to study for these purposes? Death is our one shared experience. It is the one thing that every 
single human being will encounter. I’m not really interested in writing about death and dying, 
but I am interested in what people do with and how they respond to the inevitability of death. 
Though we like to think we are rational creatures, the obituary, the defining text of our existence, 
is wrapped up in all the irrational thoughts anxieties and implicit assumptions about life, how we 
value ourselves, how we value each other, and yet, this genre that yields rich insights about what 
we value is rarely studied or written about. Yes, there is a niche audience of people who are into 
it (enter the Society of Professional Obituary Writers) but the whole practice of reading and 
writing obituaries is so ubiquitous and familiar as to be invisible, and it’s worth examining how 
we are memorializing people and what that says about us.    
This is a genre which is called into existence by the event of death, but it is all about 
living. It is a reflection of our anxieties about life and memory. Certainly, we are anxious about 
death and what comes after. It’s about what, theoretically made a life matter or not matter. We’re 
constantly concerning ourselves with questions about how we should best honor the dead, but 
it’s not really about them. It’s about us and how we would like to be honored one day.  
To accomplish this analysis of the genre, I have turned to a small sample of obituaries 
from both celebrities and everyday citizens which garnered various kinds of response or reaction. 
This is by no means an exhaustive analysis of a large sampling, and I will focus my discussion 
on obituaries in the United States. Additionally, I have utilized Michel Foucault’s work on 
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discourse as well as the work of several scholars of public and collective memory. I first examine 
satiric obituaries and how they can either defy or confirm reader expectations about 
relationships. Next, I turn to a discussion of inherent privileges manifested in the genre, and 
lastly, I discuss how the sanitization of an individual in their obituary is viewed by society.  
 
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The Relationship’s the Thing 
Death is decidedly not funny...usually. Indeed death and the dead are rarely satirized, but 
the cultural practices surrounding death such as obituaries, funerals, and mourning rituals have, 
on occasion, become the subject of satire. Traditionally supposed to facilitate grief and closure, 
these rituals have been turned to comedic purposes or become themselves the subject of ridicule. 
The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once said, “What bereaved people need is a little 
comic relief, and this is why funerals are so farcical.” Society can laugh at, even draw comfort 
from, Shaw’s remarks. A similar response occurs when we encounter a satiric obituary. When 
someone has been lightly and lovingly roasted in this medium, many readers will smile fondly at 
the unexpected humor. However, this humorous license is a fickle thing, and there is a fine line 
between the satiric obituary which garners chuckles and that which makes general audiences 
squirm because it has “gone too far” or “crossed a line.” 
In order to understand when and how faux or mock obituaries run afoul of reader 
expectations, we must first establish the function of obituaries. In her book, The Dead Beat, 
author and avid obituary-reader Marilyn Johnson asks that obituaries “Tell me the secret of a 
good life” (5). This begins to get at underlying cultural notions of what obituaries should do. We 
need to recognize that obituaries serve the living as well as the deceased. Readers of obituaries 
want to remember the “good” life, which, I would argue, is defined specifically in terms of 
relationships. Readers of obituaries don’t want to be reminded of the abusive, toxic relationships 
of the world. They want obituaries that paint an idealized picture of “good” relationships 
between parents and children, brothers and sisters. The deceased deserve to be remembered 
because they cultivated positive relationships, raised families, and helped others.  The existence 
of an obituary confirms those relationships: someone cared enough to write the obituary and pay 
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the fee to publish in the paper. It also serves to remind us that when we die, our life, too, will be 
measured in terms of the connections we built while we were living, and these connections are 
indicators of our status—signals that we mattered to a broader collective. In order for society to 
find humor in satiric treatments of obituaries, that obituary must at least seem to hold evidence of 
positive relationships with others while the deceased was alive. If this condition is violated, the 
social function fails, challenging or implicitly criticizing readers' values and self-perceptions. 
This violation of expectations registers in discomfort or even outrage. 
Satirizing an obituary allows a writer to satirize both the subject (a deceased individual) 
and the genre. A highly formulaic and idealizing genre, with a strong expectation of what should 
be included and how it should be written, the obituary offers an obvious target for parody and 
satire. There are even how-to guides that offer step-by-step instructions for crafting an obituary. 
Additionally, there are websites such as ObitKit (that name begs to be satirized, let’s be honest) 
which sell workbooks that people can fill out before they die. These templates outline how a 
person wants to be remembered and what they want their obituary to say. Why do we put so 
much pressure on what goes in an obituary? It’s such a formulaic document anyway, and it 
leaves little room for creative license, but this is what draws people to the obituary. The same 
formulaic qualities they complain about, they also crave. There is comfort in reliability.  
There are rules for obituaries. Typically, an obituary contains the announcement of death, 
a biographical synopsis, family, service times, and a few special touches such as charitable 
causes the deceased supported—usually in that order. As one step-by-step online guide on how 
to write an obituary states, “Unfortunately, many of the obituaries we see in the newspaper and 
on the web fail to convey the personality or contributions of the deceased in a meaningful way... 
Instead of a meaningful tribute, they often become a string of hackneyed phrases punctuated by 
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fill-in-the-blanks of personal information.” Note that this dismissal of the uninspired, cookie-
cutter approach to obituary writing is presented in a how-to guide for writing obituaries. Though 
people are aware of the hackneyed, fill-in-the-blank quality of the obituary, they are reluctant to 
abandon it. So stringent are the social expectations for what an obituary should do and what an 
obituary should include that these rules cannot be escaped by sites that seem to argue or promote 
otherwise.  
 In the pages to follow, I would like to generalize about the expected function of the 
obituary in the modern United States. As I will argue, first, obituaries are about confirming the 
roles of positive relationships in our lives, and second, that this display of relationships we see in 
obituaries is about a public performance of status. Obituaries highlight the deceased’s 
relationships to others while they were alive, and these publicly acknowledged relationships 
signal that worth and value should be placed on the dead. The inclusion of these connections is 
an attempt to publicly establish an individual's scope of influence. To achieve this, I will be 
analyzing examples of satiric obituaries and the responses they invoke which seem to diverge 
from strictly sincere obituaries. Responses to these satiric obituaries reveal the values and 
functions of the obituary more clearly than simply studying ordinary obituaries. I will also 
employ Michel Foucault’s theory on discourse as I examine these satiric obituaries to unpack 
why society places certain expectations on the genre and how that is connected to status.  
 No doubt the tense pressure to “get it right” stems from knowing that an obituary will be 
a public representation of the dead. Indeed, in her book, World of Obituaries: Gender across 
Cultures and over Time, Mushira Eid notes, “Obituaries are in a sense society’s final public 
tribute to its dead, and as such they reflect aspects of the social perception of people” (21). This 
notion of “social perception” deeply impacts the societal forces surrounding the grieving process 
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as a whole, but especially obituaries. This social perception is all wrapped up in our 
understanding of how the dead interacted with others while they were alive as well as our 
societal beliefs about how we should regard the dead’s relationships after they are gone. 
Obituaries as a form are predicated on the idea that the living should respect the dead and 
remember the good and not the bad, specifically the bad or failed relationships. When satire 
attacks the rules of the genre too forcefully without a nod to caring relationships with survivors 
the genre establishes, societal uneasiness and discomfort immediately result. 
What does this societal uneasiness look like, and what causes this untoward response? In 
2017, a short article and news video titled, “This may be the Most Brutal, Honest Obituary 
Ever,” was published on CNN.com. According to the story, a daughter wrote a scathing obituary 
for her father. Her obituary for him  begins just as anyone would expect: “Leslie Ray ‘Popeye’ 
Charping was born in Galveston on November 20, 1942 and passed away January 30, 2017.” 
However, the tone abruptly turns bitter, as this opening sentences continues, “which was 29 
years longer than expected and much longer than he deserved.” Ouch. Readers get the expected 
announcement of death.—They even get a nickname, ‘Popeye,’ which would usually be a mark 
of fondness and point to a personal anecdote or endearing inside joke in his family. What they 
don’t expect is this dismay that his death did not come sooner. The obituary continues to twist 
the typical expectations of the genre, stating, “Leslie's hobbies included being abusive to his 
family….Leslie's life served no other obvious purpose, he did not contribute to society or serve 
his community, and he possessed no redeeming qualities besides quick witted sarcasm which 
was amusing during his sober days.” In a twisted way, this obituary contains all the stereotypical 
information about the deceased one would expect—hobbies, qualities, and character—but 
subverts them, listing negatives instead of positives. As the reception of this obituary shows, the 
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boundary pushing in this case goes too far for reader comfort. This derisive obituary only 
displays poor relationships with the deceased, and audiences retreat from the subject red-faced 
and disconcerted. The CNN commentator who reports on the story for approximately forty-five 
seconds is visibly uncomfortable. Her posture is tense, her lips pursed, and her voice forced. 
What’s interesting, though, is that the reporter is the most shocked when she reports the obituary 
as penned by the deceased’s own daughter (One wonders if the reaction would have been 
different if a son had written the obituary.) A relationship which society expects to be a positive 
one is diminished by this biting honesty, and the function of the obituary is broken. In the realm 
of satiric obituaries, there seems to be a line audiences do not want crossed. Perhaps that line is 
honesty. Honesty about failings, shortcomings, and demons in human relationships. Obituaries 
are supposed to reassure us that we can have rewarding relationships and that these make up “a 
good life” for which we will be fondly remembered.  There is a fine line between satire and 
speaking ill of the dead, and this obituary, whether justified or not, was seen to have crossed it. 
Other satirical obituaries have walked this line more gracefully.  Unlike the obituary on 
CNN, recognized for its “brutal” honesty, another farcical obituary that went viral in 2019 was 
hailed for its “refreshing honesty.” The obituary was written for Iowa native, Tim Schrandt. In 
the obituary, his family speaks frankly about Schrandt’s crusty demeanor and sometimes 
offensive remarks. They also playfully push the constraints of the obituary genre, writing, “we 
are considering establishing a Go-Fund-Me account for G. Heileman Brewing Co., the brewers 
of Old Style beer, as we anticipate they are about to experience significant hardship as a result of 
the loss of Tim’s business. Keep them in your thoughts.” This, of course, parodies that portion of 
the obituary that remarks on causes, non-profits, or volunteer organizations that were near and 
dear to the deceased. Typically, the family will ask that people send donations to organizations in 
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lieu of sending flowers. The closing salutation states of Schrandt, “He was ready to meet his 
Maker, we’re just not sure “The Maker” is ready to meet Tim. Good luck God!” Again, this 
adjusts what readers typically see in the obituary without disrupting or denying the obituary its 
larger social functions. Obituaries usually close with lines such as “they went peacefully into the 
arms of the Lord.”. It offers a variation of the genre and subverts the gravity of the subject but 
did not raise the same uneasiness as the obituary featured on CNN. This one garnered a positive 
response. People who didn’t even know the family wrote messages in support of the deceased 
and his family on the online funeral home guestbook. One comment left by an individual living 
in England said, “clearly an incredible person and clearly much-loved by those lucky enough to 
have had him in their lives.” The existence of the obituary is, again, the best proof of those 
loving relationships. 
Why do these two obituaries, which dismantle our expectations of the genre in a similar 
way, cause such different reactions? This one is hailed for its honesty while the other is 
condemned for its honesty. Readers of obituaries, then, seem to enjoy a twist, an unexpected 
framing of the conventions of a genre as long as it does not negate or diminish the subject’s lived 
relationships. The difference, I think, lies in the tone and in the relationships. This one mocks the 
dead, but this light roasting comes from a place of fondness and love. Readers are told that 
Schrant “leaves behind his wife Cheryl Murray, who he was able to hold onto for 13 wonderful 
years (and who is promised not to have been tied down with restraints).” Yes, Schrant is mocked 
for marrying someone he didn’t deserve, but the presentation of this mockery still reinforces the 
idea that this man had good relationships with those around him and therefore, a meaningful 
existence. The implication is that this is a model relationship the rest of us should strive for. The 
authors of the obituary capture Schrant's shortcomings but don’t present them as endangering 
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relationships. Readers are left satisfied because the things they value about the form and about 
treatments of death have been left intact. The former obituary attacked the subject by attacking 
his relationships—attacking what should be embodied in the obituary and distorting the expected 
daughter-father relationship. 
This anxiety about what an obituary should and should not say about relationships is best 
explained in terms of what Michel Foucault calls discourse. Foucault suggests that language has 
force and power, and individuals carry a sense of apprehension and fear towards uncontrolled 
language because it can become too powerful and therefore, dangerous. Discourses, then, are 
systems of regulating what people say and how they behave through societal systems and 
practices which function to keep language in the bounds of social acceptability. One tool of 
discourse is ritual. Foucault states that ritual “lays down gestures to be made, behaviour, 
circumstances and the whole range of signs that must accompany discourse; finally, it lays down 
the supposed, or imposed significance of the words used, their effect upon those to whom they 
are addressed, the limitations of their constraining validity” (155-156). Crafting obituaries has 
become a kind of verbal ritual in our society. One must follow the guidelines of this ritualistic 
genre or else teeter precariously on the brink of uncontrolled language,  which generates social 
anxiety. Discourse is a way of slicing up the world by slicing up language, categorizing it, and 
policing it in specific disciplines, occasions, and forms. Foucault also suggests that discourse is a 
taken-for-granted assumption that people don’t realize they are entrenched in, but people are 
always in discourse, and therefore always placing boundaries on language which pushes the 
envelope. If a satiric obituary exists outside the bounds of the discourse, then, people experience 
apprehension in the presence of unpoliced language.   
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There are a host of such ritualistic practices and set discourses surrounding death, 
grieving, and mourning. This is nothing new. The ancient Greek satirist, Lucian, poked fun at the 
overblown social rituals surrounding death. Though he satirizes public mourning generally, his 
commentary applies to the obituary form as well. He writes, “On the one side, then, you’ll have 
the mourners rolling about in the dirt, beating their heads against the ground….The only possible 
motive left for this nonsense is the impression it will make on the other mourners” (84). Like 
other funerary rituals, obituaries are undeniably part of this social performance, a way of 
confirming one’s membership in communities by adhering to communal codes for honoring the 
dead. Though Lucian mocks these practices of public grieving and remembrance, survivors seem 
to feel a genuine obligation to remember their dead “properly.” In the preface of his book The 
Moral Demands of Memory, philosopher Jeffrey Blustein explores our moral responsibilities 
associated with memory. He explains that his interest for writing the book came partly from his 
experience with his own father’s death after which Blustein recalled memories of his father less 
and less over time, and this failure to remember perturbed Blustein. He says he was “troubled not 
so much by his death as by my failure to keep him in mind after he was gone....I had somehow 
been disloyal to him and what he meant to me by the apparent ease with which I forgot him” 
(Blustein xi). In some cases, the trouble of remembering weighs on the living more heavily than 
the actual event of death, and the practice of public remembrance can provide a sense of comfort. 
Indeed, obituaries are more directed at writers’ and readers’ own fantasies of their own 
relationships than they are at the dead themselves. The genre is not necessarily penned to 
comfort the dead, who are dead after all. They instead comfort those who survive, reminding 
them that they had “good” relationships with the dead and that good relationships make a good 
life, and they have loyally performed their duty to remember them.  
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Though Blustein’s is a singular and personal example, I would argue that it illustrates a 
two-pronged anxiety about remembrance that plagues many people who have experience the 
death of someone in their lives. The first is again this perceived responsibility to capture the 
essence of the relationship—all that the deceased has meant to us which has already been 
discussed, but Blustein also speaks to the second prong which is the perceived responsibility to 
fix the dead’s status in the public discourse and provide, through the discussion of relationships, 
a justification for why they should be valued by a broader collective. This exercise of writing an 
obituary and recalling relationship attempts to affirm to readers that with the death of an 
individual something valuable has been lost to society and not just to a few people.  
 Further, by partaking in mourning practices, mourners publicly acknowledge that this 
individual deserves to be remembered by survivors. There seems to be a push, both in the funeral 
rites mentioned here and in the classic obituary, to publicly recall those relationships. An anxiety 
persists that if we do not properly, publicly remember such relationships, we have done the dead 
and ourselves a disservice. This is something which Eid nods to as a function of the obituary 
when she states, “If the primary role of the obituary is to announce the death and invite 
participation, its underlying role is to increase participation in the event. It is for this reason that I 
propose further that in some cultures obituaries acquire an additional role--as indicators of 
status” (76). Through grieving rituals such as obituaries, someone’s death becomes a sort of 
communal event, and the participation in the grieving is another testament to the deceased’s 
impact through strong relationships and status. Indeed, we include many different layers of status 
in the obituary. A person’s profession, roles, and family members are all listed in the formulaic 
genre. Public status, in this sense, is tied to interpersonal connection, for “….how we choose to 
remember the deceased expressively constitutes both individual and collective values, 
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sentiments, and relationships” (Alfano, et al, 60). Was the deceased a good mother? Father? 
Husband? Wife? Sibling? Friend? The discourse surrounding death seems to suggest this is how 
we should represent the dead to the general public in order to reinforce the idea that the effects of 
the relationships we had in life will linger even when we are gone. People do not exist as isolated 
incidents, but rather as part of a complex web and these connections to other people situate the 
dead in a grander scope of significance—it’s about shoring up a legacy and a sense that you will 
not be insignificant after death if you nurtured your relationships.  
 Obituaries, then, become an attempt to convince ourselves that someone deserves 
remembering and shouldn’t be forgotten. They try to prove that the subject of the obituary 
mattered in life and should remain relevant after they have gone, and we think we can do that if 
we publically reinforce their ties to the living. In his book, Blustein suggests that there is a 
“moral imparative to remember the dead” (269) that we see in our societal attitudes toward the 
dead—the “certain demand” (269) to remember our connections the dead. Blustein presents three 
arguments which provide an explanation for this, and the first Blustein calls the “rescue from 
insignificance view.” In this view, “remembrance is the chief means by which we overcome the 
finality of death and through which we affirm that death has not obliterated the significance of 
the one who has died” (269-270). As expressed above, one of the ways individuals do this is 
through chronicling the relationships the deceased had with the living. We remind ourselves and 
the public that death does not delete the value of the individual. Indeed, the obituary “...enables 
us to tell the story both of individuals who have passed away and of the cultures that shaped 
them and to which they contributed. In so doing, we weave those we held dear into the fabric of 
human nature, human achievement, and human possibility” (Alfano, et al, 60). It’s a space where 
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family and loved ones can display not just what they have lost when someone dies, but what 
humanity itself is now missing.  
So, can a satiric obituary manage our societal expectations for reverential treatment of 
relationships and establishment of personal status as someone who deserves to be preserved in 
public memory as well as the comedic expectations of satire? Some obituaries seemed to have 
found a balance to manage all these forces which dictate the rules of acceptability for the genre. 
For instance, Bess Kalb published an article for The New Yorker entitled, “Obituaries My Mother 
Wrote for Me While I Was Living in San Francisco in My Twenties.” As the title would suggest, 
this includes a collection of several satiric obituaries which Kalb’s mother wrote as if her 
daughter had passed away. One such obituary states, 
We mourn the death of Bess Kalb, twenty-five, beloved daughter and sister, who passed 
away late yesterday while hiking in the middle of nowhere with no cell-phone reception. 
A product of Manhattan, Bess had no awareness of wild animals, so when she inevitably 
encountered a bear/coyote/mountain lion (apparently no longer nocturnal due to ambient 
city light, which she’d have known if she’d read the article I sent her), she may as well 
have had a giant sign around her neck that said, “DINNER.” It also could have been 
sunstroke that did her in. She had a fair complexion, like her mother. 
On the surface level, this is funny to readers because Kalb obviously isn’t dead. This alleviates 
the tension that death as a subject brings with it, but beyond that, the humor has to do with 
relationships. Kalb’s mother parodies many things in this article, including the obituary form, but 
she also pokes fun at her daughter, the “deceased” in this case. She satirizes her daughter’s devil-
may-care attitude, her “irresponsible” behavior, and her decision to live in the Bay Area. 
Through this critique of her daughter’s decisions, the writer shows signs of a strong mother-
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daughter bond, even in this helicopter mom approach. Even her seemingly belittling tone 
regarding her daughter’s unthinkable choice to go hiking when she isn’t prepared to handle the 
great outdoors evidences genuine care, concern, and connection. Readers can laugh at the 
thought of this overly cautious mother sending unsolicited advice, and while we can imagine the 
potential annoyance Kalb might experience from these warnings, this behavior stems from a 
caring bond, and that is evident to readers. This satire still fits within the rules of the discourse. 
The obituary closes by reminding Kalb of the familial bond—that she is indeed her mother’s 
daughter since they have the same fair complexion. Though this mother is teasing her daughter, 
it is clear that she is proud and will always claim her daughter as family. The relationship is 
preserved, and therefore, the discursive and ritualistic function of the obituary is preserved as 
well. The excesses of parenting and the fearlessness of youth are both gently mocked, but the 
functions of the obituary remain unquestioned. This differs, again, mightily from the first 
obituary I mentioned which was a scathing review of Mr. Charping’s life. It diminishes his life of 
any valuable relationships and expresses no desire to continue his legacy. It dissolves those ties 
to the living quickly—to ensure that he does not remain relevant and to suggest that he should 
not be remembered but rather allowed to pass freely into oblivion. 
 Charping’s daughter anticipates her obituary will cause shock and outrage. At the tail end 
of the aforementioned CNN article, the daughter is quoted as saying, “I am happy for those that 
simply do not understand, this means you had good parent(s) -- please treasure what you have,” 
and that’s the takeaway here. We spend so much time with our stomachs turning when someone 
blatantly bashes the dead and being scandalized by the impropriety of such an approach, and we 
forget to be thankful for the relationships in our lives which are good and pure and hopeful and 
fulfilling.  We project the best version of our own relationships onto the obituary, an image of 
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how we wish our own relationships had been. Therefore, the approach that jeopardizes that 
projection certainly does cause anxiety and for good reason. It subverts our notions of how we 
should treat and discuss the dead. Death is no light matter, and the inevitability of it hangs over 
everyone. We want to remember the good because we want to be remembered as good when our 
time comes. We want to be remembered for what we nurtured, who we cared for, and how we 
made ourselves and others better, not what we failed to do. If we are just to be remembered for 
the bad, we begin to approach a pessimistic idea that this life is insignificant, and that is why 
readers recoil from this type of satiric obituaries. We are also seeking a promise that our own 
memory will be rescued from insignificance when we die, a reassurance that our connections and 
meanings will be publicly established as part of the collective, that this final record will create 
for us a status that is worthy of being remembered and not forgotten, and finally, that it will lead 
those left behind to publicly mourn and grieve us. This genre should function as a reminder of 
what strong, loyal relationships look like and how they confirm our role in society, or at least 
that seems to be the function we crave from obituaries, from death, and from life.   
 
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The New, the Old, and the Noteworthy 
Death is supposed to be the great equalizer, the final force that dissipates the mundane 
concerns of life. The status, power, and wealth obtained in life surely become inconsequential 
when one is six feet under. Yet there is a privilege which comes with being publicly remembered 
through an obituary, and this privilege is not granted to everyone. The New York Times, for 
instance, has an entire staff dedicated to selecting subjects for their obituaries section, penning 
those obits, and deciding who gets the most space in the paper—who is the most important. This 
selective practice extends to most small-town newspapers as well. The obituary signals that 
someone felt compelled to sit down and write about your life, and then compelled to pay money 
so that your accomplishments are distributed for public consumption. Theoretically, none of this 
matters to the dead and everyone is supposedly equal in death. But these indications of status 
matter to the living, and they persist in the obituary.  
As this chapter will suggest, obituaries are blatant judgments about the significance of 
people’s lives, and there is an inherent privilege which comes with having an obituary published 
for you. Through obituaries, I will argue, we hierarchize and rank individuals even after they 
cease to exist. From the pages of The New York Times all the way down to The Laramie 
Boomerang, the obituary reflects societal anxieties about power, worthiness, who is granted 
access to positions of influence, and who is allowed to meaningfully participate in the world. 
Such concerns of influence, social hierarchy, and rank linger even in death. Society constantly 
grapples with questions about how we should best honor the dead and record their status after 
they’re gone, but the obituary isn’t really about the dead. It’s about how we, the living, would 
like to be honored when we die.  The obituary is about public perception, value, and influence, 
which are living concerns.  
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This tension between one sense of death as an equalizer and how we actually remember 
the dead is not new. In Homer’s The Iliad, Achilles on the one hand observes the pervasive 
nature of death, stating,  
One and the same lot for the man who hangs back/ and the man who battles hard.  
The same honor waits/ for the coward and the brave. They both go down to  
Death,/ the fighter who shrinks, and the one who works to exhaustion (262).  
Death does not pick favorites. It calls each one of us to it regardless of the glory we might have 
achieved and Achilles knows this. A short while later, however Achilles outlines two courses of 
action for himself:  
Two fates bear me on to the day of death./ If I hold out here and I lay siege to 
Troy,/ my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies. If I voyage back to the 
fatherland I love, my pride, my glory dies.../true, but the life that’s left me will be 
long,/ the stroke of death will not come on me quickly. 
 He can either die in battle and glory, and his accomplishments will not be lost, or he can go 
home, live longer, but accept the fact that his name will be lost forever from the collective 
memory. Unsurprisingly, he selects the first option and enter the fight knowing he will die but 
that his story will live on forever. The man dies long before the name, and he will be recorded in 
history and remembered in glory.  
While the specific achievements that earn one a name for posterity may differ today, we, 
collectively, still value commitment, honor, and bravery In their essay, “The Construction of 
Nonpersonhood and Demonization: Commemorating the ‘Traitorous’ Reputation of Benedict 
Arnold,” Lori Durcharme and Gary Alan Fine note that “the memory of heroic identities and 
events reveals the ideals upon which social solidarity rests. Celebration of the remembered past 
Gorman 19 
 
enhances collective commitment to those ideals” (296). Society grants a great deal of power to 
the heroes and the virtues they represent. The obituary is one final commemoration which fixes 
the living position of its subjects in place for eternity. Looking at obituaries today, we see certain 
ideals of virtues over and over: devotion to relationships, work, and the community. 
It seems obvious that we would memorialize individuals who so ardently represent our 
virtues. But many of these idols become legends in death because they had special opportunities 
in life . Not everyone is granted the chance to be legendary. This is something that professional 
obituary writers grapple with on a daily basis. In the 2016 documentary Obit., which features the 
staff of obituary writers at The New York Times, Margalit Fox, a Senior Obituaries Writer 
explains, “One of the things obit writers are often asked with real anger and real pain is ‘why 
doesn’t your page represent more women and minorities?’” Diversity should be a factor in 
selecting notable obituary subjects on a national stage, but as Fox goes on to note, “obits are an 
inherently retrospective genre. Unlike the rest of the paper which is reporting on what happened 
yesterday, we are reporting on people who were in their prime, moving and shaking, changing 
the world forty, fifty, sixty years ago....The harsh reality of our culture is that by and large, the 
only people who were allowed to be actors on the world stage forty and fifty years ago were 
overwhelmingly white men.” People cannot be remembered for something they never had the 
option to do or be in life. The obituary reflects society’s exclusions and prejudices, which don’t 
disappear with death. They are still very much a reminder of who is allowed to participate in the 
world in meaningful ways.  
Historically, our society has placed a rigid set of rules on who is invited to contribute and 
who is not. Jan Assmann touches on how this exclusion manifests itself in our communal 
memory and societal congruence in his essay, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity” when 
Gorman 20 
 
he states that “the supply of knowledge in the cultural memory is characterized by sharp 
distinctions made between those who belong and those who do not” (213).  It is very difficult for 
individuals to escape the effects of these sharp distinctions. Society and ruling Ideologies place 
strict limits on who is allowed to actively participate in those societies and who is only subject to 
them. On the other hand, people who are excluded and who don’t belong are systematically 
discouraged from the same active participation. Some have postulated that obituaries are a 
collective analysis of value (Alfano, et al. 59).  Alfano and his co-authors claim that writing 
obituaries, especially the exercise of self-authoring an obituary “helps people clarify what they 
value, how they want to live, and what their lives mean” (59). Partaking in this exercise is 
designed to be an introspective experience which focuses on an individual’s sense of self and 
their intrinsic, self-assigned value. However, certain individuals are granted the luxury of 
enjoying their intrinsic value because it resembles the extrinsic value which society has placed 
on them. For individuals who “do not belong,” such as women, minorities, and the marginalized, 
the extrinsic value prescribed to them by society is markedly less.  
 An example of this practice of self-authoring obituaries is the Black Obituary project, 
which was founded by Ja’han Jones in 2016. The goal of this project is to enable black 
Americans to write their own obituaries preemptively in case they fall victim to fatal police 
violence. There are over one hundred obituaries listed on the project’s website which have been 
penned by black individuals imagining the very real possibility of their own death at the hands of 
law enforcement. Every obituary opens by noting the individuals name and age and that they 
were “unarmed when shot and killed in conflict with local police officers.” In a 2016 Q and A 
with Patt Morrison of the Los Angeles Times, Jones explained that this project was a chance for 
black individuals to claim agency for themselves in a space where they are often not granted 
Gorman 21 
 
narrative control. As he told the Morrison, “so often, when African Americans are killed by the 
police, their photos are posted about, but their stories are not shared in a way that is 
humanizing...this [project] gives black people a chance to share their stories,” and indeed, the 
obituaries written for the project work to dismantle certain stereotypes.  
These obituaries highlight facts about the subjects which might not be recognized under 
normal circumstances. For instance, the obituary for Brian Collins notes that he served in the 
Army for nearly nine years. Additionally, he includes, “as a grateful and proud citizen of this 
country, Brian has never been to jail.  Never been arrested. Never failed a sobriety test. Brian 
Collins has only gotten 1 ticket in his life.” This paints a portrait of a dedicated civil servant 
committed to abiding by the rule of law. Another obituary authored by Allex Osborne tells us 
that he “demonstrated a passion in reversing the negative stereotypical image of black inner city 
boys through his workshops and empowered activities to help positively build character, 
charismatic, sharp, intelligent God fearing men.” This rhetoric seems an attempt to force society 
to challenge their preconceived notions and assumptions which we might hold about certain 
populations and take control of the power and force of their experiences. They tell stories of law 
abiding, contributing, and positive citizens who added greatly to our society and they are steeped 
in the implications of dreams unfulfilled and potential dashed out of this world before its time. 
Indeed, the “About” page of the project’s website explains that these obituaries have declined the 
trite and tired obituary template often employed for those killed by police in favor of their own 
rich tellings. These are Black lives, as told by those who experience them in all their glory—
tragedy—frustration—triumph.” Self-worth becomes a luxury which is not easy to enjoy for 
these individuals because their extrinsic value has been diminished by societal ideologies and the 
material practices which stem from those notions. This is reflected in the obits page. Praising the 
Gorman 22 
 
dead is a way of reinforcing what we value in the living. Unfortunately, there is a dark side to 
this preference. It moves beyond the fortification of moral values and ethical behavior and 
reinforces damaging misconceptions about who is authorized to craft a “worthy” existence. 
Hence the Black Obituary project allows individuals to establish the respect and self-worth 
denied to them in life and in death.  
For a news publication, this question of worth becomes an important one. William 
Grimes, an obituary writer for The New York Times, says of the obituary subjects he writes 
about, “the one thing all the subjects have in common besides being dead is that their lives had 
an impact of one sort or another. The word impact is infinitely elastic.” Grimes seems to 
acknowledge the ambiguous and arbitrary nature of our notion of impact, which nonetheless 
must be present for an individual to make it into the newspaper. This is The New York Times, 
after all. They cannot simply print any old obituary within its hallowed folds. The scale of 
importance must be kept intact to flatter the audience with their own importance and 
sophistication. The Obituary Desk Editor for The Times, William McDonald, notes that the 
obituary staff is responsible for writing “obituaries according to the scale of the individual, so we 
make these calculations. We actually put word lengths on human beings.” Often, this word count 
isn’t very lengthy. An “average” obituary in The Times runs between six hundred and nine 
hundred words. According to McDonald, “if you go over that, you are making a statement … 
you're going overboard, and you’re sending the wrong signal in a way to the reader.” Though he 
does not explicitly state what the “wrong signal” is, the implication is that you are giving readers 
permission to grant too much praise to a subject of too little accomplishment--encouraging the 
audience to put too much stock in the individual for the scale of their contribution.  
Gorman 23 
 
McDonald tries to reassure viewers that this practice is not an attempt to make blunt one-
dimensional assessments of obituary subjects’ lives. He argues that they are not in the business 
of “making judgements about anybody’s worthiness as a human being, but we are making news 
judgements about newsworthiness, and so the most prominent, the kings and the presidents and 
the movie stars who captured the public's attention are going to get a big obituary.” He offers 
further justification for the position of the paper in his article, “Why Most Obituaries Are Still of 
White Men,” saying that, “it is not our intent to honor the dead; we leave the tributes to the 
eulogists. We seek only to report deaths and to sum up lives...The justification for the obituary is 
in the story it tells.” However, psychologist Jerome Bruner once wrote that “To tell a story is 
inescapably to take a moral stance.” (Bruner 51), and obituaries are stories. By choosing whose 
story to tell and not to tell, The Times is very much making judgments of an individual’s 
worthiness. This practice of prescribing word counts based on the degree to which someone 
“captured the public’s attention” does indeed send signals to readers as McDonald insists. 
However, his comments suggest that these cues only work in one direction, and they do not. This 
implies that you can mislead a reader by granting an obituary subject too much significance, but 
you will not mislead the reader by granting too little significance, and they will read an 
assessment of worth into the genre one way but not another. But if word count is supposed to 
signify importance to readers, these texts become very much an assessment of prominence and 
an assessment of human beings. 
Recently, The New York Times has reexamined how they have historically assessed their 
subjects and reconsidered worthy subjects who they might have missed. The result of this is the 
“Overlooked” feature which runs a weekly installment in the obituary section of the paper. The 
project, spearheaded by Amisha Padnani and Jessica Bennett first appeared in 2018 on 
Gorman 24 
 
International Women’s Day and strives to record the stories of notable people whose death was 
originally overlooked by the newspaper. The introduction to the feature, penned by Padnani and 
Bennett, succinctly critiques the publication saying, “Since 1851, obituaries in The New York 
Times have been dominated by white men. Now, we’re adding the stories of other remarkable 
people.” The feature looks back at the history that has been missed and attempts to bring those 
stories (mostly of women and minorities) back into the present public awareness. They point to 
many prominent figures who were not given an obituary in The New York Times when they died, 
such as Sylvia Plath, Charlotte Bronte, and Ada Lovelace, and ask the publication and us as 
readers to consider why they were not included. Too, it pushes back against the earlier notion 
that more diverse subjects didn’t make notable contributions because they were barred from 
doing so. Rather, this segment suggests a failure on the part of the publication and society to 
recognize these folks. In her TED talk on how the project was born, Padnani speaks to the 
healing power of these obituaries, saying, “It's a chance to right the wrongs of the past, and to 
refocus society's lens on who is considered important,” and the impact of the project has been 
powerful and positive. Padnani noted that she received many emails thanking her for finally 
giving these women a voice.   
While this project has certainly highlighted and tackled society’s prejudice against 
women and minorities and attempted to shift the narrative focus to these historically 
underrepresented populations, I do wonder how this project’s ability to “right the wrongs of the 
past” is functioning in our discussions in the present. It touts for itself an ability to make people 
“overlooked no more,” but once these subjects have been raised up from the morgue of oblivion, 
does society take those examples to further the conversation about current injustices? Or does it 
become a way for us to alleviate our anxieties about past discretions and move forward believing 
Gorman 25 
 
that we are better? We may risk using this as a way of burying the past and absolving ourselves 
of it, for “memorializing is always in danger of operating as one of the most effective 
technologies of active forgetting” (Bold et. al. 128). Once we feel that we have properly paid 
homage to something once forgotten, we feel that we have complied with our obligation, done 
our due diligence, and rest easy while letting the memory and more importantly the issue raised 
by that memory slip away to be forgotten once more. It is difficult to use these obituaries to 
further the conversation regarding unequal representation of women and minorities in our present 
society because “memorials seal memory off from awareness altogether” (Young 272). Bold and 
her co-authors ask us to consider the challenge of remembering issues of the past while also 
keeping them relevant in the present public awareness. We do not often remember something 
and also acknowledge that it is continuous. This is because we perceive these obituaries, these 
small memorials as “intended not for action but for passive reflection” (143). We can passively 
reflect on these stories, feel better knowing they have been recorded, and let them slip away only 
to be forgotten once more. 
Not everyone is so willing to let their worth be measured out in an obituary word count, 
even if the terms of their memorialization remain subject to negative extrinsic evaluation. The 
struggle against negative memorialization is examined in the 2017 film, The Last Word, directed 
by Mark Pellington and starring Shirley MacLaine and Amanda Seyfried. The film follows 
MacLaine’s character, Harriet Lauler, a controlling and domineering woman as she approaches 
the end of her life. Her controlling nature drives her to recruit the obituary writer for the local 
newspaper, Anne Sherman, to pen an obituary preemptively which Harriet can then revise and 
approve before her death. The two form an unlikely friendship as they attempt to craft a legacy 
before it’s too late.  
Gorman 26 
 
MacLaine’s character has accomplished a great deal in her professional life. She started 
an advertising agency, and became the creative director. She is driven by perfection, and she did 
not stand down to anybody. When she is speaking to a group of young girls at a community 
center in an attempt to find disadvantaged youth to mentor, Harriet tells the girls, “there was no 
way I was not going to live up to my potential,” and it is quite clear that she was not going to let 
anyone or any societal rules stand in the way of that. However, that accomplishment came at a 
cost. Her professional aspirations drove her at a time when women were not creative directors 
and they did not start companies. Harriet notes that she always had to be twice as good as the 
men around her to obtain her position, and she couldn’t show weakness. In short, her 
professional goals did not make her a personable individual, and her personal relationships 
suffered because of it.  
Too, as the movie progresses, Anne discovers that Harriet was essentially forced out of 
her own company--the company she built, and all her professional accomplishments are 
essentially stripped from her. That potential and that drive led her directly to the achievements 
which were supposed to make up her legacy, yet the memory of her legacy is tainted by her male 
counterparts who were frightened by her ambition. In fact, when one of Harriet’s old co-workers 
comes out of the woodwork and explains everything to Anne, and he states that the other 
executives at her company “didn’t like her ‘cause they couldn’t control her.” She disrupted the 
power dynamics, the typical hierarchies, and her reputation suffered for it. So, even though she 
fought her way into a position she initially wasn’t societally allowed to hold, her 
accomplishments are still going to be discredited. Her story, her narrative, and her 
memorialization are all hijacked by a structure of power which rules society as well as the 
discourse that governs it.  
Gorman 27 
 
Differentials in power and status manifest in obituaries in other, very direct ways. Not 
every publication is focused on accomplishment and achievement quite like The New York 
Times. The standard obituary for the “average citizen” can be printed in a local newspaper...for a 
price. Most papers charge a fee for running an obituary, and those charges are usually based on 
word count, so printing an obituary can become a costly undertaking. Loved ones are responsible 
for either paying to have someone on staff write the obituary or they craft the obituary 
themselves and must pay a fee for the newspaper to print it. In our society, this is expected. One 
must pay for goods and services, so such fees seem natural; however, this ties the obituary up in 
class concerns which typically plague the living. Printing an obituary for someone is not cheap. 
Below is the pricing chart for publishing an obituary in The Laramie Boomerang: 
One death notice and one service reminder per person: Free 
First 150 words: $120 
151-200 words: $150 
201-250 words: $200 
and so on ($50 added for each additional 50 words). 
You are figuring about a dollar per word if you want to publish an obituary in this publication. 
Two hundred fifty words doesn’t give a writer much room to play with. That is a short space to 
cram an entire life into, and the price is already up to two hundred dollars. For poor family 
members already facing the outrageous cost of planning a funeral, an obituary may not be 
affordable. The truth is, not every family can afford to run an obit for the dearly departed, and 
even if they can, they probably can’t afford the length of an elaborate obituary that confirms the 
significance and status of the deceased. 
Gorman 28 
 
I remember even in my little hometown of Cody, Wyoming, a woman who was a notable 
figure in the community and who came from a wealthy family died and there was a full spread of 
her featured in our local paper. I would venture to guess that this was because her family had the 
money to do so, and that’s a great thing. If they want to do that, they absolutely should, but how 
many people out there never have an obituary published for them? Not because they were 
unworthy or unloved, but because their families or friends simply didn’t have the funds to do so 
or the deceased didn’t leave enough money behind to cover the cost. As with anything, there is a 
price tag attached to the act of dying. Though the material concerns which permeate a societal 
existence on earth theoretically cease to matter after death, the effect of having some kind of 
expendable cash grants an individual the chance to be publically memorialized. Anxieties about 
wealth may not haunt the dead, but it certainly influences how they are remembered and even if 
they are remembered.   
So why does the obituary matter? It’s simply a text that signals meaning based on 
arbitrary and ambiguous social hierarchies. As Harriet notes at the end of the aforementioned 
film, “They’re just words.” Yes. They are. But they’re more than that, too. We grant them a great 
deal of power and influence. They become important artifacts because of how we societally 
value language and, by extension, people. Foucault tells us that language is deeply linked with 
the acquisition of power because we place bounds on who may speak about what, but this 
extends beyond the bounds of discourse and into how we value people. He notes that, “In a 
society such as our own we all know the rules of exclusion. The most obvious and familiar of 
these concerns what is prohibited. We know perfectly well that we are not free to say just 
anything, that we cannot simply speak of anything, when we like or where we like; not just 
anyone, finally, may speak of just anything” (149). And not anyone may be anything or 
Gorman 29 
 
participate in anything. These rules of exclusions apply to people and their ability to partake in 
societal roles. We place a great deal of importance on narratives and stories. The implication 
within the obituaries of people who had “influence” is that these people did more, accomplished 
more, and therefore, there is more to write about them, and the newspaper allows space for those 
narratives to be fully shaped. If you were unaccomplished in your time on this earth, you don’t 
deserve the words or the space to share that narrative with the public. It is for private 
consumption only. In her book, The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse 
Pleasures of Obituaries, author Marilyn Johnson quotes Jim Nicholson, an obituary writer for 
the Philadelphia Daily News who states, “A little life well lived is worth talking about” (100). 
Yes, it certainly is, and the obituary is evidence of our desire to be worth talking about, worthy 
of distinction from others when we are gone, and intrinsically, we believe that we are worthy of 
being talked about. But if our class or status deems us unworthy of talking about, our story is 
forgotten. Johnson also quotes Chuck Strum who used to be the Obituary editor for The New 
York Times. He says, “I suffer and grieve thinking we might be overlooking someone deserving” 
(55). This suggests that there are individuals who are undeserving. Our lived anxiety becomes 
very present in the obits, then. This notion forces us to confront the fact that we may not be 
honored the way we want after death. We might be one of the individuals who is either 
overlooked or who is considered unworthy in one way or another, and we have no control over 
that. What if there is nothing worth writing?  
At the beginning of her book, Johnson claims that the obits page is “Fraught with 
significance” (4). How much significance are we missing out on as readers though? How many 
people die everyday who have no obituary written for them? Who do we miss? Who is 
forgotten? These are important questions to consider because through them we might reach 
Gorman 30 
 
insights about the way we slice things up in the world according to arbitrary things. By 
understanding how we treat the dead, we might explore how to better treat the living. We should 
push back against the compulsion to passively reflect on this form of memorialization and use it 
as an opportunity to actively assess, question, and critique how we as individuals and as a society 
collectively evaluate people both in life and in death.  
 
Gorman 31 
 
 
Heroes and Villains 
People are complex, and though the obituary, as discussed earlier, is traditionally a 
formulaic form uninterested in realism, we grant it the last word on individual meaning. This 
final nature assumes that it is up to the obituary to either capture that complexity or to ignore it. 
We only seem to desire the wholeness of an individual’s existence in certain instances. How 
much we deserve to know of the good, the bad, and the ugly of a life seems to depend on an 
obituary subject’s status while living. When “average” folks pass away, obituaries rarely mention 
the illegal or antisocial things they did while living. Instead, obituaries usually become a 
highlight reel, and there does not seem to be any kind of public demand for the less shining 
moments of that individual’s life. Accuracy is not the chief concern. However, when celebrities 
or public figures die, society usually doesn’t always want the sanitized version of their story. 
Public outcry greets obituaries that only outline accomplishments and omit shortcomings.  As 
this chapter will show, there is a divide between how we expect an obituary for a public figure to 
function and how we desire and expect an obituary for a private person to function. Society 
wants very different things, very different versions of history from these two kinds of obituaries 
because, as I will argue, the obituary for a private individual, while still constrained by the rules 
of the form and society, does not need to confirm our collective values on the same scale that 
obituaries for public figures do. Because such figures lived publicly, we believe they should die 
publicly too. Their death becomes an opportunity for us shore up our sense of what is virtuous 
and what is unforgivable.     
In Pellington’s The Last Word, Harriet is initially drawn to Anne’s obituaries in the local 
paper because Anne has an ability to purify the stories of people Harriet sees as largely 
unremarkable. Though she doesn’t outwardly admit it, Harriet knows that very few people will 
Gorman 32 
 
remember her well after she dies, so she seeks out someone who can bolster her good moments 
and eradicate her missteps. Harriet notes that Anne has only written positive things about her 
subjects--even if those things don’t necessarily create a factual or accurate depiction of the 
subject as they lived. She candidly remarks that one of Anne’s obituary subjects, Lois Shanken, 
“was a bitch,” but she then reads what Anne has written about her in the published obituary 
aloud-- “Lois Shanken, a tireless animal rights advocate passed away last night at the age of 78” 
Harriet then says to Anne, “Do you know why Lois Shanken loved animals so much? Because 
people hated her. They hated her parties, they hated her gossip, and they hated her costume 
jewelry. Only homeless dogs could bear to be around Lois Shanken for longer than seven 
minutes.” Anne, who is visibly startled by Harriet’s frankness says, “The people I spoke to only 
had kind things to say about her,” to which Harriet responds, “She was dead, and they were 
being polite.” There is something to that. Within the context of the movie, this comment 
introduces Harriet’s snarky attitude and the dark and frank humor which will be present 
throughout. But it also speaks to our larger cultural sensibilities about how we should speak and, 
more importantly, how we should publicly memorialize the dead in writing. The old adage, 
“don’t speak ill of the dead” still has a powerful hold over us. As Harriet seems to understand, 
people think that, when someone dies, it suddenly becomes impolite, improper, and unbecoming 
to say anything uncomplimentary about them, even it it’s factual. As Sigmund Freud wrote, “We 
assume a special attitude toward the dead, something almost like admiration for one who has 
accomplished a very difficult feat. We suspend criticism of him, overlooking whatever wrongs 
he may have done.” We allow people to endear themselves to us simply by virtue of the fact that 
they have died.  
Gorman 33 
 
Harriet, picking up another obituary clip that Anne has written, reads, “Eugene Baker, 
with a song not just in his heart but always on his lips--Eugene Baker sang his way into the lives 
of all who met him.” She then asks Anne, “Do you know why he sang so much? He was a 
drunk.” Anne responds, “Okay, well that’s not something I was going to write in his 
obituary….That’s not something you want to memorialize.” Something about memorializing this 
man’s status as a drunk strikes Anne as fundamentally wrong. That is a private issue, and 
breathing that into a public space violates our expectations of the document. Finally, Harriet tells 
Anne, “I knew these people...These were awful people. You made them sound as though they 
were magnificent. You made their lives sound full of achievement. That’s what you’ll be doing 
for me.” This is why we don’t push back against the lack of honesty in an obituary for the 
“average” person. We don’t want our own worst moments commemorated in the local newspaper 
after we die. We want the magnificent remembrance and the life full of achievement. If we push 
for a more complete and honest obituary for everyday people, our own obituary might end up 
revealing things we don’t want it to. Harriet isn’t necessarily critiquing Anne’s obituaries in this 
scene. Rather, she enlists Anne’s services and asks her to make for Harriet a life full of 
achievement. She knows that she might not be remembered well by those around her, but she 
wants the public remembrance of her to reveal only her best qualities.  
The desire for dilution doesn’t seem to function in the same way for celebrities and 
public figures. When the controversial radio host, Don Imus, died late in 2019 Robert McFadden 
wrote his obituary for The New York Times. McFadden attempted to speak frankly about the 
horrible things Imus said during his career, but it also mentioned the good deeds he had done and 
the causes he had supported and the popularity he garnered during his career. McFadden writes, 
“The outpouring of sympathy after his disclosure about his prostate cancer reflected not only his 
Gorman 34 
 
wide following as a radio personality but also admiration for his private charity work, raising 
millions for the rehabilitation of wounded veterans of the Iraq war and for children with cancer 
and siblings of victims of sudden infant death syndrome.” One doesn’t have to read on much 
farther, though, before McFadden recounts how Mr. Imus “went too far on April 4, 2007, when, 
in his trademark drawl, he referred to the Rutgers University women’s basketball team, which 
had reached the N.C.A.A. finals and was composed mainly of African-Americans, as ‘rough 
girls’ and ‘nappy-headed hos.’” That racist, sexist remark earned him a great deal of backlash 
and tainted his persona for the rest of his life...and indeed, after his death. McFadden’s obituary 
seems to be preserving truth and fact as opposed to a legacy. As Johnson observes from years of 
examining this genre, “The river of history that flows through the obituaries is full of ugly 
currents” (87). Here is one of those ugly currents. Don Imus was a public figure--he lived 
publicly, so in death, the implicit logic seems to be, everything should remain public. The 
audience has a right to know.  
Interestingly, there was no outcry that this remembrance of Imus was unfair or 
disrespectful to his family or memory. This is evidenced by what Mike Lupica, sports writer and 
long time friend of Imus, wrote for The New York Daily News after Imus died. Lupica 
acknowledges Imus’ aforementioned comment: “It was mean and stupid and wrong and he knew 
it. In a week, he was gone from WFAN and gone from television. There is no intent here to give 
him a pass on that as part of the rhetoric of death. He always knew it was going to high up in his 
obituary. And it is.” The “rhetoric of death.” This signifies that there is indeed a specialized 
discourse with a particular set of rules that surround the dead. Too, Lupica’s comment implies 
that that specialized rhetoric of the obituary often does have the effect of giving someone a pass 
for some of the more unfavorable choices they may have made in their lives. Lupica claims that 
Gorman 35 
 
that shouldn’t be the case here. According to his friend, this is a fair treatment of Imus because 
he had always existed in a public sphere. Changing that now would read as an attempt to erase 
the pain that his comments caused, and Lupica suggests that such an approach would be a 
disservice to the public.  
Conversely, there are instances in which the public responds negatively to attempts to 
remember a public individual in their totality. We’ve seen this quite recently with the tragic 
death of the basketball star, Kobe Bryant. Bryant’s public memorialization has been 
overwhelmingly positive. He has been praised as an athlete, a father, and a legend. Fan tributes 
have cropped up outside the Staples Center, and the support has been huge. Unsurprisingly, it 
was just announced that he is going be inducted into the NBA Hall of Fame this year. But his 
legacy is not without blemish. Marc Stein, who penned Bryant’s obituary for The New York 
Times, commits one paragraph fairly far into the obituary to the sexual assault allegation against 
Bryant in 2003. The case was dropped when Bryant’s accuser refused to testify.  When people 
have tried to bring up the sexual assault allegation against Bryant, they have faced backlash. 
Felicia Sonmez, a reporter for The Washington Post, was suspended after she tweeted a 2016 
Daily Beast article about the rape case against Bryant shortly after his death. Sonmez defended 
her actions, writing, “Any public figure is worth remembering in their totality even if that public 
figure is beloved and that totality unsettling.” That didn’t curb the backlash. People took to social 
media calling for The Post to take action against Sonmez, and Sonmez herself claimed to have 
received death threats. Similarly, Gayle King has come under fire for asking WNBA player and 
friend of Bryant, Lisa Leslie, about the allegations in an interview. She too has received death 
threats, and even rapper Snoop Dogg took to Instagram, telling King to “Respect the family and 
back off.” Based on these responses, it is clear that the public has very strong ideas about how 
Gorman 36 
 
Kobe Bryant’s legacy should be treated. Unlike in the case of Don Imus, the public, broadly 
construed, seems to be unwilling to remember Bryant in his entirety. Johnson notes that tributes 
often operate this way saying that as she read them, she began “to notice some of the life had 
been written out of it” (133). In the case of Kobe, we seem more interested in a tribute to honor 
him than a true record of events.  
So, what do we feel compelled to erase about the dead? And why? According to Carole 
Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian Ott, “public memory is typically understood as animated by 
affect. That is, rather than representing a fully developed chronicle of the social group’s past, 
public memory embraces events, people, objects, and places that it deems worthy of 
preservation, based on some kind of emotional attachment” (7). Instead of committing itself to 
faithfully retaining a whole narrative, societal groups convene around an idealized presentation 
of our public heroes. This probably works inversely, too. We avoid certain aspects of a 
celebrity’s life, presumably, because they elicit a negative emotional response. The 
acknowledgement of negative moments violates the positive ideal we collectively have shaped 
around that celebrity. Public memory is animated by affect in both directions. We remember the 
good because of our emotional attachment to that sense of excellence Bryant tirelessly presented 
his entire career, and we forget or at least attempt to silence the remembrance of the bad because 
it counteracts that positive emotional response and works against our sense of who he was, and 
nothing is more devastating than the death of an illusion.   
Finally, there are instances in which families attempt to erase terrible things about 
someone in an obituary and are met with public retaliation. In August 2019, after Connor Betts 
killed nine people in Dayton, an obituary published by his family emerged which called Betts 
funny, articulate, and intelligent (Farzan). It memorializes his affection for his dog, but makes no 
Gorman 37 
 
mention of how he died or the horrifying crime he committed. The stunned public quickly 
reacted, calling the obituary insensitive. The family ultimately removed the obituary from the 
website of the funeral home. They replaced it with a statement which apologized for their failure 
to acknowledge the pain that Betts caused his victims and their families. The statement said of 
the family, “In their grief, they presented the son that they knew, which in no way reduces the 
horror of his last act. We are deeply sorry.” This presents another facet of the complicated nature 
of public obituaries--familial grief. What we see here is a deep divide between what the family 
needs to remember and forget in an obituary as they grieve the loss of two children and what the 
broader public needs to remember and not forget as it is grieving from a shocking and horrific 
tragedy.  
Here, the public’s demand that the horrors be disclosed reveals that obituaries are never 
really about the people they are written about. Perhaps this positive remembrance is faithful to 
the family’s memory of Betts and their attempt to grieve the loss of their children. However, this 
isn’t enough for the rest of the world—this is not the image we want. We want these documents 
to remind us of what our culture values. Often, we’ll hear that an obituary or a eulogy did the 
deceased justice. But we are not actually interested in justice for the dead but rather justice for 
ourselves and in this case, justice for the victims of Betts’ actions. As discussed in an earlier 
section, obituaries are all about using a dead person as a platform for projecting cultural values, 
though in this case the values or fantasies are different. Now human relationships aren’t the 
focus, but rather that in this case, the perpetrator got what he deserved. It’s about reaffirming the 
cultural fantasy that someone who kills is defined by killing and always will be, so we are 
disconcerted to learn that someone who murders might also be funny, intelligent, and a good 
owner to his dog. We have a hard time reconciling the conflicting image in our head, and we 
Gorman 38 
 
believe that Betts’ actions are such that his story does not be deserve to be complicated by other 
information about his life, and his character cannot be multi-faceted.   
This familial collective memory is a strong thing which third party obituary writers, such 
as those at The New York Times, often have to contend with. Bruce Weber in the Obit 
documentary says, “Listen, people have selective memories. I don’t think that they make stuff 
up. I think they tell the truth as they recall it ....Families are very powerful things, and 
particularly after someone dies, you are trying to remember some things as they were and some 
things as better than the way they were.” Families maybe aren’t necessarily inventing new 
narratives, but they are sometimes recalling only certain aspects of the deceased’s life. Is the 
family really attempting to forget what happened, though? As Paul Connerton notes, “We 
cannot, of course, infer the fact of forgetting from the fact of silence. Nevertheless, some acts of 
silence may be an attempt to bury things beyond expression and the reach of memory; yet such 
silencings, while they are a type of repression, can at the same time be a form of survival, and the 
desire to forget may be an essential ingredient in that process of survival” (68). So why is the 
public acknowledgement so important to a broader audience? To an outside audience, does 
silence function in the same way as forgetting? Does the fact of silence signal that we are 
forgetting not only the horrific event but also the victims and all those affected by that horrific 
event? That is possibly where the backlash stems from. The family is mourning a private loss 
and might be burying things in the interest of personal repression and survival while society is 
mourning a collective tragedy, and the modes of remembering which are motivated by these two 
different experiences are incongruous, and the obituary becomes unable to contain everything 
that these two populations want from it. To the public, this obituary displays selective silencing 
Gorman 39 
 
of certain details, and it appears that the family is misremembering. Total silence—no obituary at 
all, is preferable to the wrong kind of remembering.  
So what of the different responses to Kobe Bryant’s and Don Imus’ obituaries? These 
two people are being used within larger cultural ritual of setting values and hierarchies. I think 
race clearly plays a role in this. Imus is an elderly white man, so we are not particularly shocked 
to learn that he made a racist comment. In many ways, he is simply reinforcing what we might 
stereotypically expect from someone of that demographic. Additionally, we have too many white 
heroes who have made it big in our world. Our culture is in the process of de-idealizing old white 
men, reassessing what we value, and learning to grapple with their crimes and imperfections. At 
the same time, we are searching for heroes of color. Kobe Bryant was one such hero. He held 
himself above the stereotypes and achieved a level of excellence that had never been seen in the 
sport basketball. His was and underdog story that we could root for. The problem with Bryant 
being accused of rape is the same as Betts being presented as a nice guy. Our culture struggles to 
accept that its heroes can sometimes be villains, and that villains might actually be (in the eyes of 
some) ordinary, nice people. As Connerton notes, “Confronted with a taboo, people fall silent out 
of terror or panic or because they can find no appropriate words” (68). These obituaries are 
evidence of that. Imus making a racist comment, while unacceptable, is not unheard of, and 
therefore perhaps not taboo. Rape and mass murder fall into that category, and the people left to 
remember are at a loss for words.   
After all of this, we are left with a case in which remembering the bad was acceptable, a 
case in which an attempt to remember the bad sparked outrage, and a case in which an attempt to 
erase the bad also sparked outrage. What are we to make of this? In each of these cases, I am not 
interested in making moral judgments. Rather, I am simply trying to make sense of the 
Gorman 40 
 
differences we see in response to these approaches and the differences in what we as a public and 
collective audience desire from an obituary based on the circumstances of death and, more 
importantly, based on the circumstances of life. We must acknowledge and be aware of this 
tendency toward omission which occurs after someone has died. Too, we must be aware of what 
motivates us to remember people in a certain light and what motivates us to silence the more 
unsavory stories. We project our desires and ideals onto the deceased. When those desires are 
met, we see no need to question them, and when they are not met, we think the subject should be 
punished. We must acknowledge that we do not apply these rules to all obituary subjects. What 
are we really preserving after death? The memory of the deceased? Or our own security? What 
information deserves to be at the forefront of our minds? That answer seems to be, whatever 
makes us feel better. Maybe there are too many factors at play in these examples to truly get at 
what drives us to honesty and what drives us to sanitation, but I suspect it’s wrapped up in what 
we value about a person’s life. Don Imus made a living by pushing the boundaries of societal 
acceptability, so remembering that in death maybe feels less foreign to a public audience. Kobe 
Bryant on the was generally adored as a basketball legend. Though his rape allegation was 
publicized some during his life, it’s not what defined him.  Tarnishing that after he is gone 
maybe strikes supporters as uncouth. Either way, I think it’s important to be aware of these 
factors if we want to understand how obituaries function in our society and how we want them to 
function.  
Gorman 41 
 
 
Conclusion 
Though the obituary is fated to always be looking backwards, the genre remains a 
valuable lens through which to analyze our present selves and society. Obituaries hold 
themselves up as a mirror to our collective systems of valuation, forcing us to face what we deem 
important. Based on my analysis, the most important things for the obituary to carry are the 
promise that good relationships will be remembered, that we will be worthy and privileged 
enough to be remembered, and that our notions of heroes and villains will be confirmed in a one-
dimensional way. In Pellington’s film, Harriet, after sampling a huge stack of obituaries, tells 
Anne, “I have determined there are four essential elements to a really great obituary. One: the 
deceased should be loved by their family. Two: the deceased should be admired by their 
coworkers. Three: the deceased must have touched someone’s life unexpectedly, and if said 
person was a minority or a cripple, so much the better. The fourth, that’s the wild card. I do not 
know what my wild card is….A statement of such breadth and wonder that it’s the opening line 
of the obituary.” If only it were that simple. Four simple elements which shroud the dead in 
honor and fond memories. Harriet displays some problematic thinking here, and the movie falls 
into reinforcing stereotypes and tropes, but the genre of obituaries does too. There is comfort in 
knowing what to expect. Unfortunately, we don’t always have that luxury. Our expectations are 
often fractured by reality. Johnson recalls reading the self-penned obituary of her friend’s brother 
which was discovered after he died by suicide: “‘He left many things well begun,’ he’d written, a 
line that still stops my heart” (231). Though the genre can seem trite and impersonal, it can also 
carry a great deal of weight and offer us insights we weren’t ready for. This tragic look at 
someone’s own perception of life is haunting—especially when that life was dashed out sooner 
than we expected. 
Gorman 42 
 
There is certainly room for further analysis—I would be interested in a feminist analysis 
of how the genre values men and women differently. Additionally, there is room for a more 
critical examination of the differences between individual and collective grief and memory. 
Sometimes the obituaries do read like a hackneyed, tired text that no one thinks about. However, 
we ask a lot of them, and if we can push back against the urge to view them as inconsequential, 
we will realize that they are the last utterance of human contribution, and that is extremely 
powerful. Indeed, the obituary is “fraught with significance” (Johnson 4), especially now. The 
grim and heartbreaking reality is, we do and are going to have plenty of samples to read 
presently. Our entire grieving ritual has been uprooted and disrupted. We can’t have funerals, we 
cannot gather to remember our dead, but we can still write obituaries. We can still tell stories.  
So read the obits section and think about it. Learn from it. Beyond the scholarship and the 
academics though there is plenty of room for that to be expanded on, take something away from 
someone’s life story. Johnson tells us that “The vivid obit is a triumph, not to be taken for 
granted; and sometimes it’s impossible to write” (231). The vivid life is a triumph, not to be 
taken for granted, and that is what obituaries are truly about.  
 
Gorman 43 
 
 
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