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Screen shot, Tips From Dead People, TikTok ([link removed]) . Mary McGreevy is also the co-founder of Epilogg, a free online obituary platform.

One year at Christmas, Mary McGreevy’s family went around the table and shared headlines for their obituaries. McGreevy’s mother, who worked as a journalist, journalism professor and later a personal historian, thought her own headline should read that she “never got hair right,” McGreevy said. “That’s completely me now.”
She is getting TikTok right, though.
McGreevy, a Minnesota-based video producer, took her love of obituaries and the lessons she finds between the lines and created Tips From Dead People ([link removed]) , an account with more than 20,000 followers.
“It’s been in my blood for a long time,” she said, “and I’ve always, always, always been an obituary reader.”
From years of reading obits, McGreevy would see details about a person’s life and want to know more.
“You make these assumptions and you have these questions about the stories that aren’t told,” she said, “And then when you get older you realize the stories aren’t told because they’re too expensive.”
McGreevy reached out to me after she came across the work I’ve done around reported obits ([link removed]) . I’m also still writing obituaries for the Tampa Bay Times ([link removed]) , and I write a weekly newsletter about obits ([link removed]) .
Before we talked, I fell into the TikTok hole with Tips From Dead People and told McGreevy that I wished I’d thought of it. I still do.
“What I like about them is that it sort of gives me little insights on what is ‘the good life,’” she said.
They can be irreverent, like Travis ([link removed]) , “cause of death: pure stubbornness.”
They can be funny, like Renay ([link removed]) , who “didn’t cook, she didn’t clean, and she was lousy with money, too. Here’s what Renay was great at: dying her red roots, weekly manicures, dirty jokes, pier fishing, rolling joints and buying dirty magazines.”
And they can be inspiring, like John ([link removed]) , who served in the Army and died in Vietnam. He wrote his own obit one year before he died. “The Army let me live in Japan, Germany and England, with experience in all of those places that others can only dream about. I have skied in the Alps, killed a scorpion in my tent camping in Turkey, climbed Mount Fuji, visited the ruins of Athens, Ephesus and Rome, gone to the opera in Munich, plays in the West End, seen the Oxford-Cambridge Rugby match, gone for pub crawls through the Cotswolds, seen the nightlife in Hamburg and earned a master’s degree in a foreign university.”
McGreevy is also the co-founder of Epilogg ([link removed]) , a free online platform for people to publish stories, photos and memories of their loved ones.
“As anyone who has written an obit knows, you are quickly confronted with the Business of Death,” the site’s About Us explains.“ The cost to submit an obituary in the U.S. is hundreds of dollars for one day … and what you get is a cold, incomplete snapshot of a full and vivid life. Social media hasn’t provided a permanent and decent alternative to the newspaper obit … We knew all along that there is a better way to get the word out about a death and celebrate a life. Using our experience with web development, digital storytelling, and start-ups, we dug in.”
Think The Knot for death, McGreevy said. So far it has about 3,000 tributes.

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The Michael Kelly Award honors a writer or editor whose work exemplifies a quality that animated Michael Kelly’s own career: the fearless pursuit and expression of truth. The award is sponsored by The Atlantic, where Michael Kelly worked from 1997 until his death in 2003.
Entries are encouraged from publications big and small, as well as from young journalists. The winning entry will be awarded $25,000, and each finalist will receive $3,000.
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Screen shot, TikTok ([link removed])

There’s space out there for thinking in new ways about obituaries, McGreevy told me, and it goes beyond local newsrooms embracing them as great stories again. She’s not the only one thinking about this.
Steven Waldman, whom you may know from Report for America ([link removed]) and now the nonprofit Rebuild Local News ([link removed]) , previously created a platform called LifePosts ([link removed]) , meant to be a place to mark births, deaths and everything in between. I’ve also had a few calls with Ari King, the founder of Homage ([link removed]) , which takes an audio approach to sharing life stories.
And while paid obits still make big money ([link removed]) for newspapers, a handful of publications are starting to publish them for free, including Richland Source, Ashland Source and Knox Pages in Ohio, according to a Nieman Lab piece from last year ([link removed]) , and Berkeleyside ([link removed]) and The Oaklandside ([link removed]) in California.
Over on TikTok, McGreevy’s sharing life lessons, big and small, from the dead. It’s a way she’s staying connected to what matters to her the most about obits – that people’s lives mean something.
“And now I don’t have to be employed by a newspaper or a magazine to say something about it.”
That's it for me! It's nice to be back at work after spring break, which was mostly just me driving my kids and their friends around, so basically regular life without the early wake ups and lunch packing.
Thanks for reading!
Kristen
Kristen Hare
Faculty
The Poynter Institute
@kristenhare ([link removed])
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