Most newspapers handle obituaries for non-famous people as paid advertisements. It’s not something they run automatically - a family member pays for the obit and usually does most of the writing.
Isn’t it, like, nobody’s business? And there’s a group of you who speculate over these things? I may be misunderstanding you, but it doesn’t seem right that anyone should be poking their nose into other people’s affairs, much less a group of nose-pokers, especially considering that it’s a tragedy within someone else’s family. Is the morbid curiosity just too much fun to resist, or what is it?
You could paste the lines that convey the feeling, and not the parts that provide identification or identifying hints. Just a thought.
Two years ago, the person whose house we bought died (he had a heart attack at a ski resort – he wasn’t particularly old), and the obit was … interesting. Clearly written by his ex wife – whom we’ve come to know as she still lives nearby – it omitted all mention of the woman he left her for and still lived with, or the divorce. In the obit, she was still his wife, although the divorce was at least eight years prior. History being written by whoever pays for publication, I guess.