Before he died at age 90, Maynard Hirshon wrote and paid for his own short obituary, which appeared in The Tampa Bay Times in Florida in 2021.
“I will be remembered for a while by my family, all whose names I am by far too cheap too list and a few friends,” he wrote, as rendered in the published item. “I had a pretty good life, and everybody dies. Bye-bye.”
His quirky, unvarnished death announcement illustrates how obituaries, which were traditionally reported and written by newspaper staff members about notable people and local residents, have evolved.
As newsroom staffs have shrunk and newspapers have turned to paid obituaries, the way has been paved for more offbeat obituaries that can be funny and brutally honest.
The rise of paid obituaries may give people a sense of leeway to cut loose, said Kristen Hare, the director of craft and local news at the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism school and research organization in St. Petersburg, Fla.
“Paid obits are still big business for newspapers, but funeral homes and publishers, including Legacy.com, have made it easier to skip them by submitting an obit directly to them,” she said.
These obituaries are notable “for how alive they feel,” said Ms. Hare, who wrote obituaries for five years as a reporter at The Tampa Bay Times.
“They stand out because they’re irreverent, which is not the tone we usually encounter around death,” she said.
A shift after the Sept. 11 attacks
Susan Soper, an Atlanta author of ObitKit: Live. Love. Laugh. Cry. Write it down!” guidebook, believes the shift from traditional obituaries began after The New York Times began publishing “pithy, poignant, very quirky, funny or heartbreaking obits for the victims of the towers and planes” after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Those became a compilation known as “Portraits of Grief.”
“Since then, many papers have realized the value of telling stories full of other news besides family, education, service, careers, memberships, etc.,” Ms. Soper said. “Now they include personality, disposition, habits, travels, food — eating and cooking — even politics.”
She has written hundreds of obituaries, some working with a person before death and other times working with families.
They have included a World War II veteran who, according to the obituary, “in a friendly way, she loved to argue and challenged friends to defend their positions as well as she could defend her own,” and a former television soap opera writer who was survived by “close to one hundred million fans in just about every corner of every country on dear Mother Earth.”
James Loveless, “a gluttonous eater of fried foods”
Rocky Loveless had never written an obituary but had read plenty of them.
After his father, James Loveless, died in Kentucky in 2023, the funeral home’s assistant director suggested that he simply write from the heart.
“I decided to do just that,” said Mr. Loveless, who lives in Arizona City, Ariz. “I wanted it to be real. I longed to convey authenticity.”
Although the obituary was only five paragraphs long, it was filled with quirky and personal details about his father.
“Jamie, a divorcee, father, grandfather and proud owner of a few lots in the trailer park, had had enough and up and died on us on June 14th in order to avoid another Presidential stolen-election mishap in the near future,” the opening paragraph reads.
The obituary said that “as a gluttonous eater of fried foods and snack cakes, as well as the occasional chili cheese dog, James tried in vain to give up the ghost by clogging his arteries and having a stroke in 2015.”
The memorial then summed up his life: He left behind several survivors, including his second-favorite son and his favorite son (Rocky), as well as “a pair of old boxers which have ‘Buttweiser the King of Rears’ printed on the design.”
“He will be moderately missed,” the obituary said.
Rocky Loveless was surprised by the attention his irreverent obituary received after a popular Kentucky sports podcast host shared the obituary and “it spread like wildfire.”
“I believe people deserve reality rather than looking at everything through rose-colored glasses,” he said. “My father was perfectly imperfect, and everyone who met him will remember him for that.”
Renay Mandel Corren, “a plus-sized Jewish lady redneck”
Another obituary that was featured in newspapers in North Carolina, Miami, Pittsburgh and El Paso, Texas, made headlines in 2021 simply with a bold but catchy opening: “A plus-sized Jewish lady redneck died in El Paso on Saturday.”
Written by Andy Corren for his mother, Renay Mandel Corren, 84, the obituary went on to say that “the bawdy, fertile, redheaded matriarch of a sprawling Jewish-Mexican-Redneck American family has kicked it.”
Mr. Corren said in an interview that he couldn’t resist sprinkling her characteristics: “Yes, Renay lied a lot.” Some of her bad habits: “Renay didn’t cook, she didn’t clean, and she was lousy with money.” And her love of family: “Renay took tremendous pride in making 1 gay son and 2 gay grandchildren.”
Mr. Corren, a writer and bartender in the Catskills in New York, wrote the obituary in short essays over the years as his mother’s health declined.
“She was lightning in the bottle so that obit was lightning in the bottle, too,” Mr. Corren said. “You only get lucky like that a few times.”
He was able to share sections of a draft of his obituary the night before she died in the hospital.
“She got to go to her own funeral in a way,” he said with a laugh.
Georgia Gee contributed research.
Johnny Diaz is a reporter for The Times covering breaking news from Miami.
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