My Dad's Obituary Was a Disaster — Here's What It Should Have Said

The obituary said he was a "devoted husband, father, and grandfather who enjoyed golf." He hated golf. He went twice. Both times he lost balls in the rough, swore loudly enough that a nearby family relocated, and declared the sport a conspiracy.

That's a real man. The obituary had a stranger.

This is the story of how we reduced a complicated person to a newspaper template — in about forty-five minutes, under fluorescent lights, while someone from the funeral home waited patiently outside the door — and what we actually lost when we did.

The Obituary as a Crime Scene

Here's what the typical obituary actually captures: birth year, death year, a list of surviving relatives, and three to five adjectives that could apply to virtually any dead person in the English-speaking world. Devoted. Loving. Hard-working. Proud.

The gap between that and the actual man is where grief lives.

Think about what you left out. Not because you were lying — because you were exhausted, because the funeral home needed copy within 24 hours, because the newspaper had a word limit, and because the instinct to make him sound universally likeable is overwhelming when you're sitting in that chair. You write the version of your dad that strangers at the service won't judge. The version that fits on a laminated card.

And so the real guy — the one who burned toast and blamed the toaster, who kept a specific grudge alive for eleven years over a parking dispute, who cried exactly once in front of you and then pretended it didn't happen — that guy doesn't make the cut.

It's not malicious. It's just that the form doesn't have a field for any of that.

Why the Sanitized Version Always Wins

In 2017, a woman named Sheila Smith wrote an obituary for her father, Leslie Ray Charping, that went viral. She wrote that he passed away "29 years longer than expected and much longer than he deserved," that he "leaves behind 2 relieved children," and that his hobbies included "being abusive to his family." It was honest. It was reported on across the internet. And it was treated as an anomaly — a curiosity — because the cultural expectation around obituaries is so locked in that honesty feels radical.

Sheila Smith later explained her reasoning: "Everything I was going to write was going to be a lie. He hated a liar."

That's not just a good line. That's a real insight about the obituary's fundamental design flaw. It's a format built for comfort, not accuracy. It comforts the strangers who read it. It comforts the distant relatives who didn't know him well enough to notice what's missing. It does not, particularly, comfort the people who actually knew him — because those people can see every omission.

The grief-industrial complex — and that's not a cynical phrase, just a descriptive one for the interconnected system of funeral homes, newspapers, and cultural scripts around death — has no real incentive to change this. Templates exist because templates work. They get the job done in the 72-hour window after a death when family members are barely functional and someone needs to file something with a publication.

Grief exhaustion does the rest. When you're running on two hours of sleep and there are phone calls to return and a service to plan and a brother who keeps asking about the will, the path of least resistance is always the sanitized version. You're not covering anything up. You're just surviving the week.

The problem is that the obituary doesn't stay in the newspaper. It becomes the first draft of how he gets remembered.

The First Draft Problem

An obituary is technically a record. Born this year, died this year, survived by these people, remembered for these things. But it functions as something more consequential: the opening statement in a much longer case about who your father was.

When that opening statement is generic, it sets a precedent. The family starts telling the safe story. The complicated parts go quiet. The things that were true but awkward — the estrangements, the failures, the moments of unexpected tenderness that you can't explain without context — get left out at the service, and then again at the next family gathering, and eventually they just stop coming up.

This is how people fade. Not dramatically. Just gradually, as the specific gets replaced by the general, as the adjectives crowd out the stories, until what's left is a figure rather than a person.

There's a version of this that happens with kids especially. If your children only ever hear the laminated-card version of their grandfather, they're not inheriting a person. They're inheriting a type. And there's a significant difference between a child who knows their grandfather was devoted and a child who knows their grandfather drove three hours in a snowstorm to bring soup to a neighbor he barely liked, and then denied doing it for years because he didn't want to seem soft. That second story tells you something.

What Your Kids Inherit When You Stop Talking About Your Dad gets into this in more depth — the silence that gets passed down alongside the silence about the person. It's worth reading if you have kids who never met him, or met him too briefly to have their own memories.

What Honest Legacy Storytelling Actually Looks Like

This is not an argument for writing a brutal obituary. Sheila Smith had specific reasons for the specificity of her honesty, and her situation was her own. The point is not to air grievances in the local paper.

The point is that the honest version — the complicated, specific, fully human version — is the one that actually preserves someone. And that version doesn't have to live in a newspaper. It can live in a conversation. In a voice memo. In a story told at dinner that starts with "you know what he was actually like..."

Legacy lives in specifics. Not summaries.

The weird stuff is usually the most accurate stuff. The dish he made wrong but insisted was right, every single time, for thirty years. The thing he said that you didn't understand until you were standing in a hardware store at forty-two and it just clicked, out of nowhere, between the PVC fittings and the sandpaper. The fight he never apologized for. The apology he gave badly but meant completely. These are not footnotes to the real story. These are the real story.

Recovering what the obituary missed doesn't require a formal process. It requires a decision to tell the true version out loud, at least once, to at least one other person who can carry it. That's it. The rest follows.

One listener on Dead Dads described a specific kind of grief relief that came not from a therapy session or a meditation practice, but from a conversation where he finally said out loud what his father was actually like — the difficult parts included. He'd been telling the safe version for two years. Saying the real version felt, in his words, like breathing again. The pain didn't disappear. It just became something he could actually hold, instead of something he was pretending not to carry.

That tracks. The sanitized version of a person is heavy in a specific way — it requires constant maintenance. You have to keep not-saying things. The real version is heavier in a different way, but it's weight you can actually put down.

The Things the Template Can't Hold

Every man who has sat down to write an obituary has felt the moment where the template runs out. You type "he enjoyed" and then you stop, because what he actually enjoyed was a specific combination of things that doesn't reduce to a list. He enjoyed arguing about directions even with GPS. He enjoyed the third cup of coffee, specifically, not the first or second. He enjoyed a particular TV show that he would never admit to watching. He enjoyed your company in ways he expressed almost exclusively through complaints about your choices.

None of that fits. So you write golf, or fishing, or woodworking, or whatever was close enough to be defensible. And you move on, because the funeral home is waiting.

But that moment — the moment where the template runs out — is actually useful information. It's telling you exactly where the real person starts. That's the edge of what the format can hold, and everything past that edge is what's actually worth preserving.

The honest legacy work starts at that edge. Not in the obit. After it.

This is part of what makes grief conversations so disorienting for men who weren't raised to have them. The format for talking about loss is almost as rigid as the obituary template. You say he's gone. You say you miss him. You say he was a good man. And then you stop, because that's where the script ends. The stuff that's true but doesn't fit the script — the anger, the relief, the complicated pride, the things you never said and now can't — sits there without anywhere to go.

How to Carry Your Father's Legacy Forward Without Forcing It addresses this directly — the difference between legacy as performance and legacy as something that actually fits the person you're carrying forward. If you're still figuring out what you're supposed to do with all of it, that's a good place to start.

What You Can Do Right Now

If the obituary is already written — if it's been months or years and you're sitting with the laminated version — the work is still available to you. It just takes a different form.

Write the one sentence the obituary got wrong. Not a whole new document. One sentence. "He didn't enjoy golf. He hated golf. He went twice." Start there.

Then write the thing that sentence opens up. The real story behind the wrong fact. That's where the person is. That's where the grief is actually sitting, waiting for somewhere to go.

Then tell it to someone. Not for their benefit, specifically. For yours. And for the record. Because the record, as it stands, has a stranger in it. And he deserved better than that.

Dead Dads exists because this conversation — the one about what he was actually like, not the one on the laminated card — is the one that most men can't find. The messy, honest, occasionally dark-humored version of who your father was and what it means that he's gone. That's the conversation. It's happening at deaddadspodcast.com and on every major podcast platform if you need somewhere to start.