What I learned writing obituaries for people who weren’t dead yet

My strangest assignment as a young reporter—and the lesson it taught me about how a life is truly measured.

When I was a young reporter at The Fresno Bee, I was assigned to the obituary beat. Along with writing the daily obituaries, I received a second, more unusual assignment: writing obituaries for prominent members of the community before they had died.

The reasoning was simple. Rather than scrambling to assemble a life story in the raw, grieving hours after a well-known person passed away, the editors wanted a thoughtful obituary already prepared—one that could do justice to a life instead of merely meeting a deadline.

That meant spending afternoons researching the lives of notable Valley residents. They might be athletes, business leaders, elected officials, or farmers—people whose work had shaped the region over decades. The reporting was done quietly, while they were still very much alive.

At first, the assignment struck me as morbid. I soon learned it was standard practice in newsrooms across the country. Newspapers kept advance obituaries as a kind of journalistic insurance policy, ready for the day important news arrived without warning.

Much of the work happened in the newspaper’s library, known to everyone simply as “the morgue”—a name that always felt a little too appropriate for this assignment. I’d pull clip files and reconstruct the arc of someone’s life: where they came from, what they accomplished, the setbacks they endured, the controversies they weathered, and the legacy they were still building.

I interviewed colleagues, friends, rivals, and family members, always with discretion. The last thing you wanted was for someone to complain that a reporter was writing their obituary while they were still alive. In truth, it was something of a compliment. It meant the editors believed that person’s life and contributions were important enough that the newspaper wanted the time to tell the story well—to get it right.

I do remember one exception. A man whose advance obituary I had just finished died unexpectedly not long afterward. One of his friends called me and, with gallows humor, said, “Can you hold off writing my obituary? I still have a lot more to accomplish.”

Most subjects knew a reporter had been calling around for life details, but it seemed routine enough not to alarm anyone. If they did call, I’d tell them exactly what I was up to, and that I wanted the obituary to be as good as possible. I’d write the story as completely and fairly as I could, hand it to an editor, and watch it disappear into a file drawer, where it would wait for a day none of us hoped would come anytime soon. Some of those obituaries sat there for years.

It was one of journalism’s strangest assignments. Writing about someone who was still alive forced me to think differently about what mattered. Awards and titles were easy enough to list, but what lingered were the stories people told, the lives they had touched, and the mark they had left on their community.

Obituaries are important family history. I once helped a friend write an obituary for her father, who had led a delightful life. But his granddaughter stepped in, wanting to cut the length to save money on the paid notice. “We already know he did all those things,” she said. Yes, I told her, but this is an article you’ll save for posterity in a family Bible, so that future generations will know how much he did. My argument didn’t persuade her.

Long before I ever had reason to think about my own obituary, I learned that the measure of a life is rarely found in a résumé. It’s found in what people remember when you’re no longer there to tell the story yourself.

That assignment taught me something I didn’t fully appreciate at the time: obituary writing is among the most careful, humane forms of journalism. You get one chance to tell someone’s story correctly, and the people who loved them will read every word during one of the hardest weeks of their lives. There’s no follow-up story that repairs a wrong date, no correction that erases the sting of a misspelled name or a diminished legacy. It requires the same rigor as investigative reporting, but without the adrenaline—just patient reporting, meticulous fact-checking, and a deep respect for a life that mattered.

It’s a discipline that’s largely disappeared from today’s diminished newsrooms, where obituary desks are often among the first casualties of budget cuts. But I still think about those drawers full of unfinished stories—lives fully lived, carefully documented, waiting only for an ending that none of us were ever in a hurry to write.