Dead or Alive

A person's personality is the most complex thing about someone. While there are traits that are abundantly clear, there are some recesses deep down that can be only be accessed through great pain, great joy, or anything personal event of a large magnitude really. That is why I feel that, while writing about someones personality on the surface may be easy, getting a TRUE feeling of someone's personality and conveying that in a story is so hard. Combine that with the fact that everything about an obituary is, well, factual , makes an obituary easier to report on and write.

Yea, the person you may be writing about is six feet under, but that doesn't mean their basic personal information died with them. 99 times out of 100, someone who is having an obit written about them has family members to verify age, cause of death, occupation, surviving relatives and the like. If not, many of those things are in fact public record, easily accessible to the reporter. I can't imagine that an obituary takes more than just one day to report and write about. If a celebrity is the subject of the obit, than a bit more digging would be required, but it must be a pretty simple task to write the obit of a normal person.