Eleanor Washburn lived 87 years, raised four children, survived two husbands, and made a mean apple pie that won the county fair three years running. She also kept a detailed diary of every bird that visited her backyard feeder from 1967 to 2024. When she died last month, her family received an AI-generated death notice that reduced her to: "Beloved mother and grandmother. Preceded in death by spouses Harold and James. Survived by children Michael, Sarah, Jennifer, and Thomas. Services pending."
That's it. Eighty-seven years of laughter, heartbreak, small victories, and quiet wisdom compressed into corporate template prose that could describe anyone's grandmother—or no one's.
The death of the local newspaper obituary section represents more than nostalgia. We're witnessing the collapse of America's most democratic storytelling tradition. For over a century, obituaries gave ordinary people what only the famous typically receive: a biographer. A skilled obituary writer could transform a retired postal worker into a protagonist, find the dramatic arc in a life spent teaching third grade, locate the poetry in someone who fixed cars for forty years.
Consider how obituary writers traditionally worked. They interviewed grieving families, asking not just about achievements but about quirks, failures, unexpected turns. What made your father laugh? What was your mother's secret talent? What story did they tell at every holiday dinner? The resulting obituaries read like compressed novels, complete with character development, plot twists, and themes.
Take this 2018 obituary from the Burlington Free Press about Dolores Johnson, a Vermont dairy farmer: "She could birth a calf, fix a tractor, balance books, and still have dinner on the table by six. But what her family will remember most is how she left encouraging notes in their lunch bags well into their thirties, until arthritis made her handwriting too shaky to continue." That's literature disguised as local news.
AI death notices offer efficiency but miss everything that made their subject human. They scan submitted information for basic facts: dates, survivors, career highlights. They cannot capture the way someone's eyes lit up when discussing their grandchildren, or how they never missed their weekly poker game even during chemotherapy. Algorithms excel at data processing but fail catastrophically at meaning-making.
- The art of finding universal themes in particular lives
- Documentation of working-class stories that rarely appear elsewhere
- A training ground for young journalists learning to interview and write
- Community memory that preserved local history through individual stories
The traditional obituary served multiple functions beyond memorializing the dead. It was community journalism at its most essential, documenting how ordinary people navigated extraordinary times. During World War II, obituaries captured how the home front experienced loss. During the Civil Rights era, they revealed integration's human cost and triumph. During the AIDS crisis, they fought stigma by celebrating lives fully lived despite tragedy.
Obituary writing also served as journalism school for many reporters. Learning to interview grieving families taught empathy, deadline pressure, and the crucial skill of finding story angles in seemingly mundane material. Many distinguished journalists credit obituary writing with teaching them that every life contains multitudes worth exploring.
This misses the point entirely. The best obituary sections were always subsidized by newspapers as public service. Families didn't pay extra for skilled writing—it was part of what local journalism provided. The shift to AI isn't about affordability; it's about profit margins.
Some newspapers now offer "premium obituary packages" where families can pay extra for human-written tributes, creating a two-tiered system where only the wealthy receive literary treatment. This represents a fundamental betrayal of the obituary's democratic purpose. Everyone deserves to have their story told with dignity and craft, regardless of their family's finances.
The solutions require recognizing obituaries as essential journalism, not optional content. News organizations should view skilled obituary writing as core editorial function, not disposable luxury. Journalism schools should teach obituary writing as fundamental skill development. Communities should demand that their local newspapers maintain this service.
Eleanor Washburn's real obituary—the one her daughter wrote herself—mentioned the bird diary, the prize-winning pies, her habit of leaving encouraging notes, and how she taught herself Spanish at age seventy-three to better communicate with her home health aide. It ran in a small Vermont weekly that still employs a human obituary writer.
That's the difference between documentation and storytelling, between data processing and democracy. When we let algorithms write our eulogies, we're not just losing individual stories—we're abandoning the principle that every life deserves a narrator skilled enough to find its meaning.