My dad died last year and we didn’t plan on paying the $400-500 to put it in the local paper (not the local-local paper, which isn’t even in print anymore, but the local-est paper in Cleveland). My uncle really wanted it and he paid for it.
It was quite the blessing that he did. Tons of people that knew dad from Ford and people he grew up with showed up. My own elderly neighbors said they saw it in the paper, at 4 AM, and came to the viewing and ended up being very supportive to me.
Lots and lots of people saw the obit as it raced around social media but the newspaper obit did have quite an impact.
But the bottom line is - price. You’re already facing tons of cost from a funeral. Most people are going to opt out of a newspaper obit because they figure everyone who needs to know will know.
Is this so? German has different words for the two, so I was surprised when, years ago, I found out (or at least I thought I had found out) that English used the same term for both. From this thread, and the cite provided in it, it seems that the use of the word “obituary” for what you call a death notice is not uncommon.
It’s not uncommon - and I think that is possibly because historically there have been a lot of newspapers that really didn’t publish the news item sort of obituary at all. I’ve been looking through old issues of the local paper that covered my neighborhood when I was a kid for an unrelated reason - and as far as “written by reporter as a news item” goes, it was very rare. There was one news article about a mother and her two daughters who died when they were hit by a car that had some obit type information , but also information about the drunk driver and his arrest. Another about a fireman who died in a fire, but that was as much about the fire as it was about the fireman. Maybe once a year there was a news-item type about someone prominent in the neighborhood who died ( a pastor or politician) but there were 20-30 death and “In Memoriam” notices every week.
Dad died in 2017. My step mom wanted an obituary (yes, that’s what they called it) and had me write it. It was a longish one and it cost $718. What an absolute fucking waste. His employer and a few professional societies copied it word for word which is where most of his collegues must have seen it. It was also on the mortuary web page.
My Daddy had prepaid his funeral costs. The obituary notice cost was handled by the Funeral home. My oldest brother wrote a paragraph and they added it.
The whole cost of Funerals is outrageous.
I hate every thought of a penny being spent over my own dead body.
I won’t be able to complain.
We got a mailing that had, in red, “Please RSVP” stamped on the outer envelope. It was an invitation to stop by and arrange your own funeral. HAH!!! Aint gonna happen.
About 10-15 years ago the local paper (now hanging on by a greasy rope) would publish a “standard” obituary for free. Name, birth date, date of death, names of immediate family, location/time of visitation and service. Any more information like when they worked, accomplishments, picture etc… would cost extra per line.
Then they started charging for any type of obituary. Apparently they got so much negative feedback and threats of cancellation they allowed free “death notices”. Basically a 2 line statement saying this person from this town died on this day. Anything else was charged a hefty (in my opinion) amount.
I think when my mom died a few years ago it was around $350 for what was a standard obituary that was free a few years before.
I do wish that the family would put in a basic death notice, especially if the person lived out of town and their name wouldn’t show up on the local funeral homes’ website that I check several times a week.
My local paper has pages and pages of obituaries, even a separate section for them at times. I feel like the amount of space devoted to them has vastly increased. Several paragraphs and a picture is standard. There’s always advertising on those pages as well.
Maybe they’ve decided to charge small amounts for them just to bring in some cash flow. Maybe somebody on top just likes them. But they are, so to speak, alive and well here.
Pretty much this. A friend of mine works for the local newspaper and has almost his entire career (he’s semi-retired now). When my mom died last year we looked into running an obituary and was shocked to find it cost $150 per inch of text. So a standard obit would’ve cost ~$600 conservatively. Considering her cremation and 12 death certificates cost just under $2k, a 4" obit would’ve been 1/3 again the cost. Not prohibitive in strict terms, but there was little point in spending that kind of money on something so short. Mom’s ghost would’ve come at me had I spent that kind of money on something she would’ve found no doubt superfluous.
When I asked my newspaper buddy about this he told me that the decline of obits in his paper has been 100% attributed to the high cost they charge. The newspaper doesn’t care as fewer obits means more ad space, which brings in more revenue.
Wow. Y’all got some high-falutin’ costs! I just looked at our local paper, and it says “$38.50 per column inch for obituaries 11.75” and under”. A front-page name-only is $11, and a simple internal death-notice is $7.50. We’re getting a deal!
When my wife died in 2004 I seem to remember having to pay to have death notices placed in the Chicago Sun-Times and Tribune. I’m sure I have a copy of the paperwork from the Cremation Society which arranged this somewhere in my files.
Shortly after she died someone from the Chicago Tribune called me and asked me some questions about her, which resulted in an article about her being printed a few days later. After all these years I have no idea what generated this, as Patti was hardly a noted member of Chicago society.
My mother prepaid for what SHE wanted - the barest minimum cremation - about 4 years before she passed - at which point her care had used every other penny she had. Knowing what she had decided, and not having to scrape up the cash, was an extraordinary relief to us. She had composed a doggerel poem that she wanted called into her favorite talk radio show as her ‘last words’ which we did, and put it on Facebook as well - everyone who needed to know found out, and found out exactly how she felt about not wanting any fuss. I hope to do as well myself.
My mother actually wrote my dad’s obituary (and my grandmother’s too, in 2007). Dad died in October at the age of 90, and the relatively small obit with a B&W picture, which my sister took a while back, cost $400. She actually wrote a longer one but edited it when she found out how much it would cost to print it.
Obituaries nowadays are considered a form of advertising, and charged accordingly. It’s also not uncommon for a small obit to appear in the paper, and “A complete obituary will be posted at xyzfuneralhome dot com.”
As a counterweight of sorts: I did place my wife’s obituary in the local paper when she died three years ago.
It was pricey–not as pricey as some are reporting here, but maybe $250 IIRC. It only ran in the Sunday paper. But several people that I know of found out that she’d died through this death notice, and likely wouldn’t have found out any other way for weeks, months, or years.
We have/had our finger in a lot of pies here and have met a lot of people who we’re not in regular contact with, so it seemed to make sense to do that (our jobs were both in education, which is a good way of coming into contact with people!). I don’t regret running the obit, despite the cost.
I’ve never heard of death notices. Back in the goode olde days, when there were thick newspapers and I used to read them, the section was called “Obituaries” in most of the papers I was familiar with - or if it was “Death Notices” too, that was not obvious. Obituaries used to run several pages of small type, some with a photo.
I had no idea they were so expensive, never having to use the service. I had assumed they were a nominal fee, but I suppose - like want-ads, remember them? - the price has grown over the decades.
However, I agree as newspapers have faded, so have obtuaries. I’m trying to remember the last time I bougth a newspaper. My in-laws, pushing 80, get the paper delivered and apparently my father-in-law does read the obituaries section.
I’m guessing another factor is age. My dad died at 92. My step-mother at 97. My wife’s grandmothers at 92 and 98 respectively. Anyone who knew them outside of family probably couldn’t arrange the transport from their old folks home for the funeral, and y parents moved hundreds of miles after he retired. That’s the issue - outside of families, most contemporaries are likely the same age and have the same mobility issues, as longevity increases. Plus, acquaintances from work are long lost if someone retires in their early 60’s and dies in their 90’s. Thanks to air conditioning (and global warming) people who lived in their house instead of a care home have far less interaction with their neighbours, who likely are different ages and have little in common. My parents’ services and my stepsister’s were mostly atteneded by family members and one set of neighbours.
Elaborate funerals for most people are a disappearing trend. My mother’s second husband had a memorial “get-together” in his house, where most of the people they’d worked with over the previous decades attended. Cremation, no actual service or lying in state, since neither had any religious inclinations.
Sometimes, in the midst of my last few years(I hope years) I think I want the biggest gaudily overdone funeral. Laying in state several days. Stinky flowers out the wazzoo. Sad, sad music and tears. Floods of tears. Maybe one of my Sisters fainting.
Other days I wanna find a cave, crawl in and die. To decompose in my own time, TYVM.
I just don’t know. I’ve money put back for costs. Not brave enough to plan a thing at an actual funeral home.
I guess what will happen will happen with out my input.
Our local rag has virtually no subscriptions, no delivery. You can pick them up in a couple places or they’ll mail it to you a few days late.
I love a newspaper better than about anything. It makes me sad they’re going away.
Jewish law and culture demands you cheap out on funerals. No flowers. The cheapest possible casket- rough pine with rope handles is perfect. No burying jewelry with the deceased. No embalming.
I’ve told my 80 year old mother that the greatest expense at her funeral will be the male stripper. Yes, I’m serious. Yes, she approves. Yes, it’s an appropriate way to remember her.
That’s what I was going to say. In my experience the whole premise of the OP is wrong. Our local newspaper still has several pages of obituaries/death notices every single day.
Yep! Some interesting social science research on this. (This is the article I always assign to my Comp 102 students when I’m teaching them how to read and make sense of a journal article, in the hope that knowing about this phenomenon will help them make wiser decisions when they have to plan a wedding or a funeral for themselves.)