Yours Truly

You will die and be forgotten. Unless you’re famous, the forgetting takes no more than two generations. You live on in the memories and stories that people share when you’re gone. That’s ultimately what you leave behind: A story.

In Yours Truly: An Obituary Writer’s Guide to Telling Your Story, James R. Hagerty argues that your friends and family members don’t know your story, at least not the way you might expect. Time after time, Hagerty interviewed friends and family members of the deceased only to find that they knew very little about the dearly departed. It is for this reason that Hagerty suggests that you should tell your own story. It’s best to do it now.

A year ago, I came up with a similar idea. In the end, I told people, your life will be reduced to 600 words or less in the back of a newspaper. That will be the story of your life. If you want to understand your life story, write your obituary as though you were to die tomorrow. In 600 words or less, what’s your story? What did you achieve? What were the highlights? Where did you overcome adversity? Who did you love? And what impact did you have on other people? 

With that to hand, I suggested writing a second version as though you lived a full life, dying of old age. What do you want that story to be, I asked. Looking at both obituaries side by side, what are the biggest differences? Importantly, what do you have to do differently to make the obituary of your full life into your story?

The idea is that you should take these two obituaries out on your birthday every year. In the case that you die tomorrow, how has the story of your life changed? Are you happy with it? And does the story of your full life hold up? Have you made progress towards realizing that story? Or have your ambitions and values changed in a way that warrants rewriting the story?

I call this The Obituary Project. The trouble is this: I’ve talked to several people about the value of this project but I’ve never actually done it. Writing your obituary is hard. It’s one of the projects I’ve committed myself to in 2026. 

I turned to Yours Truly for guidance. Hagerty offers practical advice. First and foremost, just start. If you try to perfect your story, you’ll never get through it. Secondly your obituary should answer three core questions: What were you trying to do with your life? Why? And how did it work out? 

Hagerty puts forward a list of questions to ask when writing an obituary—yours or someone else’s. The questions span everything from What are your earliest memories? And who were your first friends? To What was it like the first time you fell in love? And what advice are you most eager to give to young people? There are over 30 questions in total.

While Hagerty’s advice will take obit-writers a long way, I feel Dan P. McAdams offers better advice in The Stories We Live By. McAdams’s approach to the life story interview seems more thorough and, removed from the context of death, less grim. The biggest difference comes down to meaning. Hagerty writes about people he didn’t know after they were gone. In that case, you can only ever shape a story. McAdams writes to surface meaning in people’s lives. The aim is to help people understand why their life matters and reshape the narrative when necessary. I wrote more about that here.

The two approaches can work together. I will incorporate both when writing my obituary lest someone else do it for me.