Obituary Template for a Mother

What belongs in your mother's obituary

Children remember mothers in the body and in the house. The sound of her in the kitchen before anyone else was awake. What she made on Sundays. The phrase she said so often you can hear it now without trying. These details are not decoration. For the people who loved her, they are the proof that the obituary was written by someone who knew her, and they are what other mourners will quote back to you at the service.

Write down her sayings first, before you write anything else. They fade faster than you expect. Then write what her hands did, because a mother's work often lived in her hands. Bread, gardens, hems, a cool palm on a forehead. One concrete image of her hands will do more than a paragraph of adjectives like loving and devoted, which are true of every mother and therefore describe none of them.

Then step back and remember that she was a whole person before you existed and beside you all along. She had a girlhood, maybe a career, maybe a faith, friendships that predated the family, opinions and talents that had nothing to do with raising you. Give that woman a place in the obituary too. Many daughters say later that writing this part is when they finally saw their mother entire, and it is the part your mother herself would most want included.

If she mothered beyond her own children, say so. Godchildren, neighborhood kids, students, the friends of yours who called her mom. That widening circle is often the truest measure of the woman.

A shape you can fill in

Obituaries for mothers usually open with the family fact of her death and close at her table, in her kitchen, or in her garden, wherever home gathered around her. Here is an order that works. Fill in each line in your own words, and skip what does not apply.

Line by line

• Her full name, including her maiden name, her age, and the date and place of her death
• Where and when she was born, and to whom
• The outline of her younger life, school, work, how she met her husband or built her family
• Her children, named, and what raising them looked like in her house
• One paragraph of texture, her cooking, her sayings, her hands, the rituals of home
• Who she was beside being a mother, her work, faith, art, causes, friendships
• Grandchildren and the late-life joys she took in them
• Who survives her and who went before her
• Service details, and where to send flowers or donations

A full example, Rosemary

Rosemary Ellen Kovac was born in 1941 and never once let a person leave her house hungry. She died on March 4 at her home in Dayton, Ohio, at 84, with her daughters beside her and the radio on low, the way she liked it.

She was born Rosemary Ellen Walsh in Youngstown, the second of five, and learned to cook for seven before she was twelve. She married Frank Kovac in 1963, two weeks after he first saw her at a church dance and told his brother he was done looking. They were married fifty-one years, until his death in 2014.

Rosemary raised three daughters on a bookkeeper's salary and a garden that would not quit. Her kitchen table was the courtroom, the confessional, and the party. She had a saying for everything. Worry is interest paid on trouble you have not borrowed yet. Her paprikash recipe exists nowhere on paper and everywhere in her daughters' hands.

She kept the books for Sacred Heart parish for thirty years, sang alto badly and joyfully, and read a mystery novel a week until the end. Her grandchildren knew her as Nana, the woman who kept butterscotch in her coat pocket like other people keep keys.

She is survived by her daughters, Karen Mills, Diane Kovac, and Susan Petrie, seven grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. A funeral Mass will be held at Sacred Heart Church on March 9 at 10 a.m. In place of flowers, feed somebody.

A full example, Lorraine

Lorraine Baptiste Charles, 72, of New Orleans, died peacefully on June 12 after a long illness she never once called by its name. She preferred to talk about you.

Lorraine was born in the Seventh Ward in 1953, the only daughter of a seamstress and a longshoreman, and carried both trades in her somehow. She could mend anything and she could carry anything. She graduated from Xavier University in 1975, the first in her family to finish college, and taught fourth grade in the Orleans Parish schools for thirty-four years. Generations of children learned cursive, multiplication, and self-respect in her classroom, in roughly that order.

She raised her sons, Marcus and Andre, mostly alone and entirely well. Home was red beans on Mondays, church on Sundays, and homework at the kitchen table with the television off, no appeals heard. Her boys' friends called her Miss Lorraine and minded her better than their own mothers.

After the storm took her house in 2005, she rebuilt it twice, once with insurance and once with stubbornness. She loved gospel radio, a good hat, and being right, and she was rarely denied any of the three.

Lorraine is survived by her sons, four grandchildren who believe she hung the moon, her brother Curtis, and a city full of former fourth graders. Services will be held June 20 at 11 a.m. at St. Augustine Catholic Church. Wear something beautiful. She would notice.