You may remember back in March of this year, agebuzz Guest Blogger Susanna Barton wrote a post on Getting Write: Pen Your Obituary, Plan Your Funeral. In that post, she provided useful information as to how to consider drafting an obituary for yourself and why such an act would be a gift for relatives and loved ones who would otherwise be faced with that task while at the same time grieving your death. Along with her valuable advice, we now add the resource of the website Trustworthy, which is a digital vault into which several members of a family can put important plans and documents, including end-of-life paperwork and funeral arrangements. Trustworthy has information on its website, along with obituary templates and samples, to help you draft your own obituary or to help ease the process of writing the obituary for another. So grab a pen and paper and look here.

While writing an obituary and reflecting on death are serious matters, it seems it is also a moment to take stock of what makes a person an individual- whether it’s peculiar habits, idiosyncratic interests, or just plain weirdness. Recently, the Washington Post highlighted the obituary penned by Charles Boehm for his father, Robert Adolph Boehm. Apparently, Charles did not hold back when it came to his father’s idiosyncrasies, which he described in detail and with much (loving) humor in the obituary. Unsurprisingly, after being posted online by the funeral home, the obituary went viral, and more than 1 million people have now read about the unique personality and lifestyle of the late Robert Boehm. See for yourself by clicking here. And for more humorous and weird obituaries, along with fun and surprising facts more broadly about death, you may want to listen to the podcast OBITCHUARY or glance through the recently published book Obitchuary: The Big Hot Book of Death, which examines the American culture of death and how we go about summing up lives in the form of obituaries.

But there’s more to life (and death) than a humorous obituary. In the end, the drafting of an obituary says as much about the life of the person as it does about their death. Warren Buffet has said, “You should write your own obituary and then figure out how to live up to it.” In essence, an obituary can be a document that not only captures what someone’s life was like, but what their dreams and aspirations may have been. In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, writer Kelly McMasters describes how she has tried to write her own obituary each year, to memorialize both the good and bad times of each passing year and to chart the changes and phases of her life, many of which have now “died.” It’s a valuable way to see how your life has evolved and she even will at times write an “aspirational” obituary if she’s not happy with the year that has just been. As she writes, “When I flip through my old obituaries, I am flipping through past versions of myself.” The bottom line for McMasters? Writing her own obituary each year is a practice she cherishes, as it’s “a practice and value of holding death close, so I can remember to live.” So, while providing your loved ones a gift that they will no longer need to write themselves, writing your own obituary (or reading the obituaries of others) might even give you the gift of discerning what in life you still want to achieve and can experience. You might even learn something new about yourself.