A sample funeral biography — and the questions behind every section

If you are reading this at a kitchen table with a funeral home’s deadline in front of you, skip ahead. The biography starts below, and it reads straight through if you ignore the question lines.

A funeral biography is not an obituary. An obituary has a job to do in a small space — announce a death, name the family, give the time and place. It is written to be read once, quickly, by many people. A funeral biography has the opposite job. It is written to be read slowly, more than once, by a few people, most of them years from now.

That difference is why the two are written differently, and why the biography is usually the easier of the two. An obituary asks you to compress a life. A biography only asks you to remember it out loud. Why a life tends to need more room than the notice allows is an argument this site has made elsewhere; this page is the other half of it — what one actually looks like once it is finished.

Below is one, in full. The person is invented — Alma Ruth Whitfield never lived — but the shape is the ordinary one, and the questions are the ones that actually produce answers.

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Alma Ruth Whitfield

1938 – 2026

Where she came from

The question: “Where did she grow up, and what was the house like inside?”

Alma Ruth Coley was born in March of 1938, the fourth of six children, in a rented farmhouse outside Batesville with a wood stove in the front room and no indoor plumbing until she was eleven. She remembered the year the plumbing arrived the way other people remember a wedding. Her mother kept chickens. Her father drove a gravel truck and, in bad winters, did not.

She was the child who read. There were four books in that house and she read all four repeatedly, which she always said was why she never minded a slow afternoon.

What she did all day

The question: “What did she do all day, for most of her life?”

For thirty-one years Alma ran the cafeteria at Sylamore Elementary. She started as the second cook in 1962 and was managing the kitchen by 1968.

She fed roughly four hundred children a day. She knew which ones came to school hungry on Mondays and she fed those children more, quietly, without ever once making it a matter of discussion. Several of them are grandparents now. Two of them are coming to the service.

She retired in 1993 and said the only thing she missed was the noise.

How she met Del

The question: “How did they meet? What was the first thing she noticed about him?”

She met Delmer Whitfield at a church social in 1959, where he was standing near the food and not eating any of it. She noticed his hands — a lineman’s hands, already scarred at twenty-two. She told him he was welcome to a plate and he told her he was working up to it. They were married fourteen months later and stayed married for fifty-four years.

Del climbed poles for the electric co-op through every ice storm that county had from 1958 to 1996. Alma kept a bag packed by the door for those weeks, because he would come home at three in the morning, sleep for four hours, and go back out.

What she was like to be around

The question: “What did she always say? What would she be doing if you walked in unannounced?”

If you walked in unannounced you would find her at the kitchen table with the radio on low, and she would get up to feed you before she said hello.

She said “well, we’ll see” about nearly everything — good news, bad news, weather, elections. Her children learned to hear the difference between the hopeful one and the other one. Her grandchildren never did and found it maddening, which she enjoyed.

She did not like to be photographed and there are, consequently, very few pictures of her. The one on the program is from 1974 and she did not know it was being taken.

What she made

The question: “What did she make with her hands?”

Quilts, mostly. Forty-one of them that the family can account for, and probably more that went out the door to people who needed one. She pieced them from clothing — a shirt of Del’s, a dress a granddaughter outgrew — so that each one is a record of a particular decade of the family, if you know how to read it. Three of her quilts are in the room today.

She also kept a garden that was frankly too large for two people, and canned what came out of it, and gave most of that away too.

The hard stretch

The question: “What was the hardest stretch, and how did she get through it?”

Del had a stroke in the spring of 2008. He lived another six years and Alma cared for him at home for all six, which is not a sentence that conveys much unless you have done it.

She learned to transfer a grown man from a bed to a chair. She learned the medications. She got very tired and did not say so. When people offered help she generally said “we’re fine,” and the family has agreed, in the years since, that this was the one thing she was wrong about.

She was with him when he died in 2014. She said afterward that the six years were hard and that she would not have traded them, and that both of those were true at once.

What she would want said

The question: “If she could hear this read out loud, what would she want in it — and what would she want left out?”

She would want it shorter.

She would want it said that she was not remarkable, and her children would like the record to show that they disagree, and that this is the last argument she is going to lose.

She would want the grandchildren fed.

Those who survive her

The question: the conventional one — who is left, and who went before.

Alma is survived by her daughters, Ruth Ann Pickens of Mountain View and Carol Whitfield of Little Rock; her son, Dale Whitfield of Batesville; nine grandchildren; and fourteen great-grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her husband, Delmer; her parents, Roy and Etta Coley; and her brothers Roy Jr., Vernon, and Bud.

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What to notice about the shape

That biography is a little under eight hundred words, and none of it required anyone to compose a paragraph from nothing. Each section is one person answering one question. It is the product of a conversation rather than a writing session, which is why it can be done in an afternoon by someone who does not consider themselves a writer.

A few things worth taking from it:

It is specific and small. Four books. A bag by the door. A photograph from 1974. Nothing in it is a summary of her character; the character comes out of the particulars. “She was generous” would have told you less than the quilts going out the door.

It says the hard thing plainly. The six years with Del are the center of the document, and they are not softened. A funeral biography that contains only the pleasant parts tends to read as a document about someone else.

It lets her be difficult. She would want it shorter. She would not be photographed. She was wrong about accepting help. A person who is only praised disappears.

It does not end with a lesson. The survivors close it, the way these documents traditionally do.

If you have an hour and a blank page

Ask the questions in the order they appear above, of whoever knew the person best, and write down the answers roughly as they are said. Do not clean up the phrasing yet. The phrase you would smooth out — well, we’ll see — is usually the one the family will remember the document for.

If you want more to ask than the handful used here, there is a longer set in what to ask when you sit down to record someone’s life story, and a more formal protocol in the dignity therapy questions.

Then read it out loud once. That is the only edit that reliably matters, and it will tell you what to cut.

If two people remember something differently, put both versions in. That disagreement is part of the record too, and in thirty years it will be one of the more interesting things on the page.