PFEIFFER: When a death is unexpected, like when a news-maker dies at an unusually young age, it can be a scramble to put together an obituary. Other times, writing an obit is a decades-long process.

As people age, they read obituaries more and see their contemporaries there. How they are worded says a lot about them. Consider writing your own.

When most people think of death notices, they imagine dry, formulaic paragraphs. These seem to be written by an undertaker with a thesaurus. But, there’s a hidden world that sees this as a form of ...

She will not be missed, thus reads the concluding sentence in one of the most jaw-dropping obituaries we've ever read. The obituary for Kathleen Dehmlow starts innocently enough, that she was born ...

When his grandmother died about two years ago, Jebar King, the writer of his family, was tasked with drafting her obituary. But King had never written one before and didn’t know where to start. The ...

Warren Buffett says you should decide what you want your obituary to say and then live your life to deserve it.

“I wanted to do right by their families, and leave a historical record ensuring that their full lives, and not just their passing, were recorded and remembered.” In June, the writer Lore Segal, who ...

Editor's note: This editorial mentions suicide and overdose. Jonathan Nalikka was one of my close friends in high school. I remember him as the boy standing by my kitchen sink with yellow rubber ...

What would happen if your company ceased to exist? Would journalists write headlines heralding your past achievements, or would their stories simply add you to a list of bygones? Would analysts ...