MuchLoved

The ability to place an obituary online has helped enable bereaved families express themselves much more easily and publicly than had been the case in the past. Previously the only public notice of a death would normally be a newspaper obituary and after the funeral service the family would be expected quite quickly to ‘get on with it’. In addition, any obituary beyond the reporting of the essential facts and details of the death was normally out of the control of the immediate family and could lead to some distress if felt to be incomplete or inaccurate. Whilst online obituaries do have issues that need to be addressed in terms of the right of a person to create and publish one and also the verification of the details contained in the obituary, there is no doubt that it has become an important tool in the expression of grief and so the healing process.

If you would like to create your own online obituary for someone you have lost and cared about, please do give MuchLoved a try. It is very easy to create your tribute and the service has been designed to be as sensitive and as personalised as possible. MuchLoved is dedicated to helping the bereaved work through their grief by enabling people to express and share their feelings and memories. You can find out more at MuchLoved

The changing way that people can now create their own obituaries

Traditionally, leading and public figures could expect an obituary written on their death, produced by an independent writer looking to create an accurate assessment of their character and life. For the rest of us, a brief notice of death in a paper, a generous eulogy at our funeral and maybe an epitaph on our gravestone might be all we could reasonably expect to be made public about our life.

But no longer it seems can obituary writers dictate who is written about and what is recorded as the official assessment of their life. Rapid developments in the internet are allowing ordinary people to record and display accounts of the life of their loved ones on memorial websites for posterity.

This trend is also leading to the merger of the concepts of an objective obituary and an emotive memorial. Why keep your obituary matter of fact, to the point and textual when you can also add pictures, sounds, even video to better encapsulate the character and personality of the deceased.

Memorial website services like the charity MuchLoved are growing rapidly to satisfy the demand of the ordinary bereaved to both express their personal feelings of grief and loss and to commemorate and celebrate the life of their loved one.

This trend may well be helping to create a higher level of emotional intelligence. It is widely recognised that actively recognising your loss and remembering your loved one are integral parts of the grieving process. Memorial websites are certainly helping to break down some of the taboos surrounding bereavement and the stiff upper lip ‘get on with it’ pressure that society as a whole imposes.

They also help empower the next of kin to tell their story, using their websites to communicate their thoughts and feelings to their wider family. There have also been cases of bereaved families using their memorial websites to communicate directly to journalists or to the public at large after a media reported death.

This new era of ‘next of kin’ memorials, motivated by feelings of love and loss, does however clash with the maxims of accuracy and objectivity held so dear by professional obituary writers. With the passing of time, when emotions and perspective have changed, will such subjective memorials hold much authority in terms of recording an individuals life and legacy?

The factual obituaries of the present may become the tall stories of the future. But such camp fire tales and lovingly recalled stories are what family legends are made of. What better than to find out from rose-tinted memorials that your family ancestors were far from ordinary, even if it does give your ordinary life something to live up to.