How Honest Is Too Honest in an Obituary?

1. Honesty about the cause of death

This is the fastest-changing category. In 2018, the Vermont weekly Seven Days published an obituary for Madelyn Linsenmeir, who died at 30 after years of opioid addiction. Her sister, Kate O’Neill, wrote it. It named the addiction plainly, described Maddie as “hilarious, and warm, and fearless, and resilient,” and included the line “To some, Maddie was just a junkie.” It closed by addressing people still struggling: “know that every breath is a fresh start.”

It was read millions of times. O’Neill later joined that paper to cover Vermont’s opioid crisis.

This is not an isolated case. Sociologist Meghann Lucy analyzed 210 obituaries for premature deaths in West Virginia across 2010, 2015, 2017, and 2019, published in Social Science & Medicine in 2024. Explicit references to drug use and overdose became both more common and more direct over that decade, tracking the shift in public understanding of addiction from a criminal matter to a medical one.

The same shift is underway with suicide. In October 2018, Kari and Jason Eckert wrote in their 15-year-old son Robbie’s obituary that he “was suffering in the darkness, battling privately with incredible pain,” and named depression and suicide directly. They included mental health resources in the notice and directed donations to a foundation created in his name.

2. Honesty about flaws, told with affection

The most widely shared obituaries in this category name real faults and treat them as part of the person rather than evidence against them.

Chris Connors died in 2016 at 67. His obituary, published in Seacoastonline, put it this way: “As much as people knew hanging out with him would end in a night in jail or a killer screwdriver hangover, he was the type of man that people would drive 16 hours at the drop of a dime to come see.” It listed his regrets. It was not a sanitized document, and it was unmistakably written by people who loved him.

Andy Corren’s 2021 obituary for his mother Renay in the Fayetteville Observer described hers as “a bawdy, rowdy life lived large, broke and loud.” It set up the expectation of a model stay-at-home parent and then cut it off mid-sentence with laughter. It became a national story.

3. Honesty as confession

Some people write their own and use the space to settle something. Val Patterson’s self-written obituary ran in the Salt Lake Tribune in 2012. He confessed to stealing a safe from a drive-in in 1971 and admitted he was not actually a PhD, explaining that a diploma had arrived in the mail by clerical error and he never corrected it. He also wrote about regretting the cigarettes that killed him, and about what his death would cost his wife.

4. Honesty as public warning

This is where honesty stops being personal and starts making a claim on the reader.

In 2013, two of Marianne Theresa Johnson-Reddick’s children submitted an obituary to the Reno Gazette-Journal saying she was survived by “6 of 8 children whom she spent her lifetime torturing.” It closed with an explicit purpose: to “revive our message that abusing children is unforgiveable, shameless, and should not be tolerated in a ‘humane society,’” and to “stimulate a national movement” against child abuse.

In 2017, the daughter of Leslie Ray Charping in Galveston, Texas, wrote that his death came “29 years longer than expected” and that “he possessed no redeeming qualities besides quick whited sarcasm.” She later explained the reasoning: “This obituary was intended to help bring closure because not talking about domestic violence doesn’t make it go away.”

Both were harsh. Both were also aimed at something beyond the person who died.

5. Honesty as verdict

In June 2018, the children of Kathleen Dehmlow published a 105-word notice in the Redwood Falls Gazette in Minnesota. It stated that in 1962 she became pregnant by her husband’s brother, moved to California, and abandoned her children. It closed: “She will not be missed by Gina and Jay, and they understand that this world is a better place without her.”

The newspaper pulled it. Legacy.com said it would review its procedures. A relative told the Star Tribune the facts were accurate but incomplete. Her son, who now goes by Jay Dehmalo, told the same paper they “wanted to finally get the last word.”

The pattern that actually matters

Sort the examples by public reaction and a line appears, but it is not the line most people expect. It is not about severity. The abuse described in the Johnson-Reddick obituary was more extreme than anything in the Dehmlow notice, and it was received more sympathetically.

The difference is what the honesty is doing.

Naming what happened invites the reader in. Someone reading about Maddie’s addiction, or Robbie’s depression, or a mother’s violence, may recognize their own family in it. The disclosure gives them something.

Pronouncing a verdict on whether a life was worth anything closes the reader out. If the family needs that for closure, it’s their prerogative. We’re not trying to tell you not to do that. Grief is complicated.

There is a second, quieter pattern. The obituaries that held up named specific things: an addiction, an arrest, an affair, a debt, a diagnosis. The ones that generated backlash made summary claims about a person’s total value. Specifics are testimony. Summaries are sentencing.

If you are deciding right now

A few things worth knowing before you write.

You are not obligated to disclose anything. Not the cause of death, not the addiction, not the estrangement, not the diagnosis. Some families disclose and find it freeing. Others find that the death is the only fact they owe anyone, and that is a complete answer. Privacy is not dishonesty.

Naming a stigmatized cause of death is increasingly ordinary. If you want to say overdose, or suicide, or cirrhosis, or dementia, you will not be the first. Holly Prigerson, a professor at Weill Cornell who studies bereavement, notes that avoiding acknowledgment of how someone died can complicate your own ability to process the loss. That is a reason to consider it, not a reason you must.

For suicide specifically, there is established guidance. Name it if you want to. Leave out the method and the location. Tell a balanced story that includes the person’s life alongside the illness. Consider including a support line for readers who need it. Dan Reidenberg of the National Council for Suicide Prevention has been direct that the goal is making the conversation possible, not making it dramatic.

Other people are named in this document. Siblings, children, grandchildren, and former spouses appear in obituaries by name, and they will be associated with whatever you write for a long time. In the Dehmlow case, living relatives were the ones who absorbed the response. Anyone you name has a reasonable claim to know what you are publishing about them.

It may not stay up. Newspapers and funeral homes pull obituaries. Three of the notices described above were removed after publication. You do not fully control the document once it is submitted, and you should assume it will circulate beyond the people you wrote it for.

Write it, then wait a day. The version written in the first 48 hours after a death is usually not the version you want permanently attached to your name. Anger is legitimate. It is also loud, and it fades at a different rate than the rest of grief.

One test

Before you publish a hard sentence, ask what a stranger does with it.

If a stranger reads it and understands something true about a life, or recognizes their own situation in it, or knows what to look for in someone they love, the sentence is doing work. Keep it.

If the only person served by the sentence is you, that does not automatically make it wrong. It makes it worth a second look, and worth asking whether the obituary is the place for it, or whether it belongs in a letter you keep.

Honesty is usually the better instinct. It just is not the same thing as full disclosure, and it is never an obligation.