The Story Behind the Year's Funniest Obituary

When the uproariously funny obituary for William Ziegler recently went viral, we wanted to learn more about the story behind the words. We talked to Ziegler's family members and found out how they worked together to create the perfect tribute to their father.

William Ziegler was a father of four, a wartime Navy veteran, a New Orleans firefighter, and a beer drinker. But it wasn’t the facts of his life that caught the attention of people around the world; it was the way in which his children lovingly captured his sense of humor and spirit in an obituary that has been shared all over social media and inspired hundreds of people to sign the online Guest Book for a man they never met.

Ziegler lived much of his life in New Orleans but had relocated to the Houston area in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He had been ill toward the end of his life and unable to travel. After his death, his children decided that an obituary in the hometown newspaper would be the best way to notify old friends and acquaintances of his death.

“I felt like this was a way that he was able to reach people one last time,” said daughter Sharah Currier. “My youngest brother said it the best; he said, ‘I really feel like this is our last gift to him.’”

None of Ziegler’s four children had written an obituary before.

“Nobody knew what to include in the obituary. We didn’t know if there was a standard way to do it,” she said. “We really didn’t have any idea of what we were doing.

Although he would often forward obituaries to his children that he found funny or interesting, she didn’t recall ever having a conversation with her father about what he would like to have included in his own obituary. They did know they wanted the obituary to be humorous since that was the way their father approached life. But in the aftermath of his death, it was hard to find the humor right away.

On a flight from Houston, Texas, to his home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, son Scott Ziegler began writing the list of facts about his father’s life.

“I tried to think about some of the things that would be interesting to know about him. The things that those of us who already knew him would recognize: the potted meat, his preference for a beer that we all continuously told him was disgusting,” Ziegler recalled.

For his military service, Ziegler was highly decorated. “He was awarded a medal for valor for Vietnam, but that’s not something that he really wanted to talk about while we were growing up. It was not something that he felt comfortable sharing with us in detail,”