The questions an obituary never asks

An obituary is a strange little form. It tells you when someone was born, when they died, who they left behind, and where to send flowers. Then it ends. You could read a hundred of them and never once learn what any of those people were like.

That’s not the obituary’s fault. It was built for the newspaper, priced by the line, written in a hurry during the worst week of a family’s life. It does one job, and writing one that sounds like the person is its own craft. The problem is that we let it stand in for the whole person, and it was never big enough for that.

So here are the questions it never asks. You don’t need a website or a form to use them. You need a phone with a voice recorder and someone who’s still here to answer. If you want the method too, the setting, the session length, how to get a reluctant parent talking, that’s how to interview a parent about their life. This piece is about the questions themselves.

What did they always say?

Everyone has a line. A thing they said at the dinner table, a warning they gave you a hundred times, a joke that stopped being funny and became a family password. Most people can name their grandmother’s line in about three seconds. Almost no obituary contains it.

Write down the sayings. They carry more of a person than a job title ever will.

What did they love doing, and did it change?

People are not one thing across a whole life. Your dad might have been a fisherman at 30 and a woodworker at 70. Your aunt raised horses, then quit cold and never looked back, and there’s a story in why.

Ask what they loved. Then ask what they used to love, and what happened. The change is usually where the good part lives. Memory research backs the instinct: people past forty recall their teens and twenties in scenes and their fifties in summaries, so the early loves come back richest.

Who were their people?

Not the family tree. The people. The friend from the plant who came to every barbecue. The neighbor they argued with for forty years and would have died for. The person they called first with good news.

A life is mostly other people. An obituary lists the ones related by blood or marriage and drops the rest, which is backwards, because the friends are the ones the family will want to find later.

Where were they most themselves?

There’s usually a place. A kitchen, a workshop, a front porch, a specific chair, a lake in August. Ask where the person you’re thinking of was most at home in their own skin. You’ll get a scene, not a sentence, and the scene is what people remember.

What did they want the ones who came after to know?

This one is best asked while someone is still living, and it’s the one people wish they’d asked. It doesn’t have to be grand. Sometimes the answer is “work hard and call your mother.” Sometimes it’s a recipe. Sometimes it’s a long pause and then something you’ve never heard before.

Ask it plainly. Let the pause happen. Record the answer.

Why bother writing any of this down

Because memory is not storage. The details go soft faster than you expect, and they go together, so you don’t notice the gaps until someone asks a question you can no longer answer. Ask anyone who has lost a parent what they miss and cannot call back, and most will say the voice.

You don’t need to make it a project. Ten minutes on a phone, one good question, a name and a date on the file so you can find it later. Do that a few times and you’ve kept more of a person than any obituary ever held.

We built Perdura because families kept telling us the same thing after a loss: we have the two dates, and we’re missing everything else. If you want help turning these answers into something that lasts, that’s the whole reason we exist. But the questions work with or without us. Start with one.