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 ...

When his grandmother died about two years ago, Jebar King, the writer of his family, was tasked with drafting her obituary. But King had never written one before and didn’t know where to start. The ...

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 ...

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 ...

“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 ...

The funeral director said “AI” as if it were a normal element of memorial services, like caskets or flowers. Of all places, I had not expected artificial intelligence to follow me into the small, ...

Two days after Jeff Fargo’s mother died, he lay in bed, crying, at home in Nevada and opened his laptop to ChatGPT. Her friends had asked about an obituary, so for nearly an hour he typed about her ...

When prominent people pass away, NPR reporters go on the airwaves as soon as possible to encapsulate what are often complicated lives. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT) MICHEL MARTIN: Former Vice ...

In June, the writer Lore Segal, who had started hospice at her home in Manhattan, sent an email to her friends. “I am not sad or angry or afraid,” she wrote, according to a lovely profile in the New ...