Obits get a brutally realistic makeover

Once a platform for fond memories, flowery language, and dare we say it…a sanitised version of the deceased, the obituary is fast becoming brutally honest.

An American couple recently wrote an obituary airing their son’s dirty laundry.

“Our beautiful son, Andrew, died from an overdose of heroin,” read the first sentence.

While it was the secret Andrew Oswald didn’t want to get out, that didn’t stop his parents from sharing his addiction in his obituary when, at just 23, Andrew died. 

Friends and neighbours in his hometown of Hamilton, New Jersey, were shocked to read the young man they knew as a gifted writer, music buff and all around good influence had an opioid addiction. 

His mother, Stephanie explained in the obituary that they wanted to share his story “in the hope that lives may be saved and his death will not be in vain”. 

“Addiction is a mental illness. No one plans to be an addict,” it read. 

“None of his friends knew he was doing drugs until he went to rehab,” Andrew’s mother, Stephanie, said of her only child.

While the Oswalds were well aware they were sacrificing their son’s “clean” image with the forthright obituary, they believed they did so for a higher purpose.

“I was hesitant,” said Stephanie, who wears her only child’s ashes in a locket on a chain around her neck.

“I felt like I would be outing my son.

“My husband said ‘We’re putting it in there. Tell them, tell them that they’re playing Russian Roulette if they take opioids or heroin’.”

However, this isn’t just an American trend as one Brisbane wife recently shared publicly that her husband had taken his own life in an attempt to shine a light on the tragic affects of undiagnosed depression.

Read more: Moving letter about Aussie doctor’s health goes viral

Would you share a loved one’s secrets in their obituary?