How to Write an Obituary for a Husband: A Guide With Examples

Writing your husband's obituary may be the hardest short piece of writing you will ever do. You are being asked to summarize a whole life, and your own life alongside it, in a few hundred words, usually within a day or two of losing him, usually while the house is full of people and paperwork.

If you are reading this at the kitchen table with a blank page in front of you, start here: it does not have to be beautiful. It has to be true, and it has to be finished. Beautiful often comes anyway, in one small detail you almost left out.

What an obituary is actually for

An obituary does two jobs at once, and knowing which is which makes it much easier to write.

The first job is practical. It tells people he has died, who he leaves behind, and when and where they can come. Much of an obituary is simply information, and information is allowed to sound like information.

The second job is the tribute. It is the two or three sentences that make someone who knew him say, that was him. That part does not need to be long. One specific detail usually does more work than a paragraph of adjectives.

A eulogy is the longer, more personal version, spoken at the service. An obituary is shorter, printed or posted, and read by people who may have known him only slightly. You do not have to fit everything into it.

Gather the details before you start writing

Half of the difficulty of an obituary is that it asks for facts you do not have in front of you. Collect these first, on a separate piece of paper, before you try to write a single sentence:

• His full legal name, including middle name, and any nickname he actually went by
• Date and place of birth, and date of death
• The town where he lived, and how long
• His parents' names, including his mother's maiden name
• Your wedding date and where you were married
• Children and their spouses, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, with correct spellings
• Siblings, living and predeceased
• Military service: branch, years, conflict if any
• Work: where, what he did, how many years
• Church, lodge, union, team, volunteer work
• Service details, if they are settled, and where to send flowers or donations

If you are unsure of a date or a spelling, call someone and ask. Families remember obituary errors for a long time, and they are the one kind of mistake that is genuinely easy to prevent.

A simple structure that works

Nearly every obituary that reads well follows roughly this order. You can fill it in one line at a time.

• The opening line. His name, age, town, and the date he died.
• Where he came from. Born to whom, where, and what his early life looked like.
• Your marriage. When and where you married, and how long you had together.
• His working life. What he did, and anything he was known for doing well.
• Who he was. The tribute lines. What he loved, what he was like to be around.
• Survived by. You first, then children, grandchildren, siblings.
• Preceded in death by. Parents, and any children or siblings who went before him.
• Service information. Dates, times, locations, and donation requests.

A sample obituary for a husband

Here is a complete example, written for a man who did not exist, so that you can see the shape of the thing. The details are generic on purpose. Replace them with his.

Raymond Allen Keller, 74, of Marion, died peacefully at home on March 4, 2026, with his family around him.

Ray was born in Marion on June 12, 1951, to Walter and Edith (Bauer) Keller, the third of five children. He graduated from Marion High School in 1969 and served four years in the United States Navy before coming home for good.

On September 9, 1974, he married Carol Jean Whitfield at St. Mark's Lutheran Church. They were married fifty-one years. Ray spent thirty-six of those years at Hollings Machine and Tool, where he was a foreman and, by his own account, the only man who could keep the old number four press running.

He kept a garden that fed half the street, listened to the same three Merle Haggard records for forty years, and never once let a grandchild leave the house without something in their hand. He was at every one of his daughters' ball games, and later at every one of his grandchildren's, usually standing at the fence rather than sitting in the bleachers.

He is survived by his wife, Carol; his daughters, Anne Keller Ruiz (Miguel) of Columbus and Sarah Keller of Marion; four grandchildren, Ella, Thomas, Grace, and Walt; his brother, Dennis Keller (Joyce) of Fort Wayne; and his sister, Marilyn Hoff of Marion. He was preceded in death by his parents and by his brothers Walter and Paul.

A funeral service will be held at St. Mark's Lutheran Church on Saturday, March 8, at 11 a.m., with visitation one hour prior. Burial will follow at Riverside Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to the Marion Food Bank.

Notice how short the tribute paragraph is, and how much of it is made of small, concrete things: the garden, the three records, the fence instead of the bleachers. Those are the lines people will stop on.

Writing about your marriage

This is the part that stops most people, and it is worth saying plainly: you are allowed to write about yourself in his obituary. You were half of his life. One line about your marriage is not self-indulgent, it is accurate.

You do not need to explain what he meant to you. The number usually does it. They were married fifty-one years. They had eleven years together, and he used every one of them. A reader fills in the rest.

If the marriage was complicated, as long marriages often are, you are not obligated to narrate that in a newspaper. An obituary is not a full accounting. It is allowed to be the kindest true version.

Common mistakes, and how to avoid them

Leaving out a name. Read the survivor list aloud to one other family member before you submit it. This is the single most common source of hurt feelings.

Writing only in adjectives. "He was a loving husband, devoted father, and hard worker" could be almost any man. "He drove his daughter to college in a truck with no air conditioning and never mentioned it again" could only be him.

Not checking the word limit. Many newspapers charge by the line or the column inch, and some have a hard cap. Ask the funeral home or the paper what the limit is before you write, not after.

Trying to write it alone at midnight. If you can, sit with one of your children or a friend and talk it through out loud first. Obituaries written in conversation almost always come out warmer than obituaries written in silence.

Rushing the cause of death decision. You never have to include it. "Died peacefully at home," "died after a long illness," or simply "died" are all complete sentences.

If you cannot find the words

Some days the writing will not come, and that is not a failure of love or of effort. It is grief using up the part of your mind that makes sentences.

When that happens, stop writing and start listing. Ten things he always said. Five things he was good at. The thing he did every Sunday. You can build an obituary out of a list far more easily than out of a blank page, and the list is usually where the real detail is hiding anyway.

Some families also find that the remembering goes easier when it is not all words on paper. At Their Life Song, we take the stories families tell us about someone, the small specific ones, and shape them into an original song in his memory, something to play at the service or keep for the years after. If that sounds like it might help, it is there. If not, the list on the kitchen table is enough. It always was.

Related reading

• How to Write an Obituary: A Step-by-Step Guide With Examples
• How to Write a Eulogy for a Husband: A Guide With Examples
• Obituary Examples: Sample Obituaries for Every Relationship