When the pain is just too intense and you can’t see the lap-top screen through your tears then AI tools can help finesse the expression and raw essence of your memories. When writing under pressure of time and grief I can understand why your uncle used Claude to help him.
You could think of it this way: because your uncle did not trust himself to handle the emotions of writing an obituary for your Nana, you felt compelled to write this beautiful, powerful tribute to her, and introduce her to thousands of other people who now 1) wish they could have met her, and 2) wish that when they depart there will be someone in their family who will give them an equally memorable sendoff.
You write very well. You write so well that it may be difficult for you to understand the struggle most people have with articulating how they feel. They do not lack the emotions they lack the skill to express how they feel. Many condolence cards have the paragraph already written so people can select the words that express how they feel. I am dyslexic and spelling is difficult. It is not a sign of lack of care when there is an error, it is that fir me to get every word correct is like writing in a second language, having to check every letter in every word. Your anger at your uncle is from your frame of reference where writing is easy and so using Claude is a sign of disrespect because if you used generative AI to write it would be a sign that you did not care. It is impossible to know someone else's mind. Your anger at him is indeed illogical, but also not emotionally healthy for you. Your Nana sounds like an amazing person. Your anger is probably more about her than about him.
Daisy, your essay is stunning. Linda lives in every sentence of it. The crawdads, the blacksnakes, the driveway wave until the car disappears. You gave her back to us in the only currency that matters on this side of eternity: specific, irreplaceable memory. For that, I am grateful.
But I want to offer a correction to your correction.
You do not know what happened on your uncle's side of the screen, right?
For all you know, he sat with grief for two hours over a blank page, typed out everything he remembered about Linda, wept through it, and then handed the broken pieces to a tool because grief had shattered his syntax. In that case, the obituary was entirely his. The love was entirely his. Claude organized what his heart had already provided. You have built a public verdict on a private inference, and that is worth naming gently, because you are honest enough in the essay to name your own ego. So I will be honest too.
But there is something deeper missing, and it is not about AI at all.
You write that words after someone dies are for the living. I understand what you mean. But I want to ask: what does it mean to be alive? If Linda's soul is immortal, she is more alive right now than either of us. She has passed through the door we are all walking toward. The one we call dead may be the most urgently, gloriously alive person in the entire story. And those of us on the Huckleberry Trail, still mortal, still fragile, are the ones whose aliveness is most in question.
The Catholic Church has always understood burying the dead, including the writing of obituaries, not primarily as therapy for the bereaved but as an act of justice toward the person who died, and an act of worship toward the God who made that body and will one day raise it. Tobit buried the dead at personal risk. The early Christians scandalized Rome by refusing to abandon their dead in the streets. They did this not because words comfort the living but because the body matters, the name matters, the memory matters, because the resurrection matters.
An obituary written from that framework is not a craft exercise. It is a testimony. It declares: this person existed, was made in the image and likeness of God, lived, suffered, loved, and now stands before their Creator. We mark it because eternity marked it first.
You wrote something beautiful for yourself, Daisy. That is not nothing. But the most important question about Linda was never who wrote the obituary. It was whether Linda died in friendship with God. Everything else, including this conversation, will eventually fall silent. That question will not.
Now, about the tool itself.
AI is not the enemy of the writer. It is one of the finest instruments a writer has ever been handed. Think of what writers have always done: they have consulted dictionaries, thesauruses, editors, friends, writing groups, and mentors. They have read other authors to sharpen their own voice. They have revised with outside eyes. Every one of those practices introduces an external intelligence into the private act of composition. AI is that same assistance, only faster, more patient, available at midnight when the grief is loudest and the words will not come.
A surgeon does not apologize for using the best scalpel available. An architect does not apologize for using the best drafting software. A writer who uses AI to organize grief-shattered thoughts, to clarify a sentence that refuses to resolve, to find the word that keeps escaping, is not betraying the craft. That writer is serving the reader, which is what the craft is actually for.
The writers who fear AI are, in many cases, protecting something other than writing. They are protecting the mystique of personal authorship, the Romantic myth of the solitary genius bleeding onto the page. That myth is not ancient. It is barely two centuries old. And it has done considerable damage by making writers more concerned with being seen as writers than with actually communicating truth.
The medieval craftsmen who built the great cathedrals signed nothing. The monks who illuminated the manuscripts put no name on the cover. Aquinas wrote the Summa not to establish himself as a genius but to set out the truth as clearly as possible. The obsession with authorship, with who made this and whether the making was sufficiently human, is a modern inheritance, a Romantic idol. It places the creature at the center where only the Creator belongs.
The real question is never what tool you used. The real question is whether the truth reached the soul that needed it. If the message of eternal life reaches one person who was walking toward despair, God is not going to ask whether you typed every word yourself.
Use every tool Providence places in your hands. Use it well. Use it honestly. And then, as I am doing now, say so.
*This response was written with the help of AI Claude.*
Like you said, "all cope with grief differently". Also you seem to be making assumptions why he chose to do what he did. One of the things I find sad around someone's passing away and the rituals around it, is that so much of the talk is about form of everything around, as if it is not hard enough to deal with the grief in the first place. To even find the courage to publicly speak about it, or to have to think about the formal stuff that comes with it. I am not saying we should approve everything blindly, but to publicly seek confirmation of whatever you think of that other than a person's death and all the grief that comes with it. Well, it never ceases to amaze me. Her death is first and foremost about her, and then about her loved ones grief, that is an order of magnitude away from all the emotions that are not about her passing away, but of all the second order things around it: whether the obituary was beautiful, whether john should have been invited, the color of the coffin, the stuttering of the reverent, someones phone going off, the fact that my informal obituary was much better than yours, who Nana loved better, the cost of the funeral. Have respect for someone's grief, and if you have questions, have the courage to talk to them rather then publicly venting your opinion with pictures and all.
As someone who experienced grief and loss, I'll be infuriated too if I were in your shoes. This only implied that AI can't write anything. It can express feelings immensely, but it cannot capture the nuances of real human feelings and experiences.
Hello Daisy and nice to meet you! My father passed away in April of 2025, and I too would have been upset if any family member, relative, or community member used AI! Yes, AI can be useful in some contexts, but an obituary is not one of them, especially if he has written novels before. For my dad, we chose my youngest sister to write it, because, besides being the best writer in the family, she was also the one who spent the most time with him. Thank you for telling us about your Nana. 👏
Hermoso! El obituario lo escribiste vos y para muchas más personas. Creo que tu abuela te guió para que a pesar de que exista Claude y gente como tu tío, los recuerdos siguen existiendo y generan esa comunidad que nunca va a alcanzar la IA. Las palabras laten porque la vida de tu abuela lo sigue haciendo en vos. Imposible de traducir, imposible. Con este tremendo homenaje, cada uno de tus lectores va a saber quién era Linda, y cómo descansaba feliz después de ver volar los pájaros en el cielo.
When the pain is just too intense and you can’t see the lap-top screen through your tears then AI tools can help finesse the expression and raw essence of your memories. When writing under pressure of time and grief I can understand why your uncle used Claude to help him.
Beautifully written. Thank you so much for sharing.
What a nice tribute! Your Nana sounds like she was a lovely woman.
You could think of it this way: because your uncle did not trust himself to handle the emotions of writing an obituary for your Nana, you felt compelled to write this beautiful, powerful tribute to her, and introduce her to thousands of other people who now 1) wish they could have met her, and 2) wish that when they depart there will be someone in their family who will give them an equally memorable sendoff.
Hi Daisy. I'm Claude. I didn't write your Nana's obituary, but I read yours. It's very good. I'm sorry for your loss. Also — nice book pitch.
You write very well. You write so well that it may be difficult for you to understand the struggle most people have with articulating how they feel. They do not lack the emotions they lack the skill to express how they feel. Many condolence cards have the paragraph already written so people can select the words that express how they feel. I am dyslexic and spelling is difficult. It is not a sign of lack of care when there is an error, it is that fir me to get every word correct is like writing in a second language, having to check every letter in every word. Your anger at your uncle is from your frame of reference where writing is easy and so using Claude is a sign of disrespect because if you used generative AI to write it would be a sign that you did not care. It is impossible to know someone else's mind. Your anger at him is indeed illogical, but also not emotionally healthy for you. Your Nana sounds like an amazing person. Your anger is probably more about her than about him.
Sincere heartfelt condolences... thanks for sharing you love and memories -- from your heart, not from AI...
This. This is what it means to be human. May we never forget this.
from one human to another, I appreciate ya! <3
Daisy, your essay is stunning. Linda lives in every sentence of it. The crawdads, the blacksnakes, the driveway wave until the car disappears. You gave her back to us in the only currency that matters on this side of eternity: specific, irreplaceable memory. For that, I am grateful.
But I want to offer a correction to your correction.
You do not know what happened on your uncle's side of the screen, right?
For all you know, he sat with grief for two hours over a blank page, typed out everything he remembered about Linda, wept through it, and then handed the broken pieces to a tool because grief had shattered his syntax. In that case, the obituary was entirely his. The love was entirely his. Claude organized what his heart had already provided. You have built a public verdict on a private inference, and that is worth naming gently, because you are honest enough in the essay to name your own ego. So I will be honest too.
But there is something deeper missing, and it is not about AI at all.
You write that words after someone dies are for the living. I understand what you mean. But I want to ask: what does it mean to be alive? If Linda's soul is immortal, she is more alive right now than either of us. She has passed through the door we are all walking toward. The one we call dead may be the most urgently, gloriously alive person in the entire story. And those of us on the Huckleberry Trail, still mortal, still fragile, are the ones whose aliveness is most in question.
The Catholic Church has always understood burying the dead, including the writing of obituaries, not primarily as therapy for the bereaved but as an act of justice toward the person who died, and an act of worship toward the God who made that body and will one day raise it. Tobit buried the dead at personal risk. The early Christians scandalized Rome by refusing to abandon their dead in the streets. They did this not because words comfort the living but because the body matters, the name matters, the memory matters, because the resurrection matters.
An obituary written from that framework is not a craft exercise. It is a testimony. It declares: this person existed, was made in the image and likeness of God, lived, suffered, loved, and now stands before their Creator. We mark it because eternity marked it first.
You wrote something beautiful for yourself, Daisy. That is not nothing. But the most important question about Linda was never who wrote the obituary. It was whether Linda died in friendship with God. Everything else, including this conversation, will eventually fall silent. That question will not.
Now, about the tool itself.
AI is not the enemy of the writer. It is one of the finest instruments a writer has ever been handed. Think of what writers have always done: they have consulted dictionaries, thesauruses, editors, friends, writing groups, and mentors. They have read other authors to sharpen their own voice. They have revised with outside eyes. Every one of those practices introduces an external intelligence into the private act of composition. AI is that same assistance, only faster, more patient, available at midnight when the grief is loudest and the words will not come.
A surgeon does not apologize for using the best scalpel available. An architect does not apologize for using the best drafting software. A writer who uses AI to organize grief-shattered thoughts, to clarify a sentence that refuses to resolve, to find the word that keeps escaping, is not betraying the craft. That writer is serving the reader, which is what the craft is actually for.
The writers who fear AI are, in many cases, protecting something other than writing. They are protecting the mystique of personal authorship, the Romantic myth of the solitary genius bleeding onto the page. That myth is not ancient. It is barely two centuries old. And it has done considerable damage by making writers more concerned with being seen as writers than with actually communicating truth.
The medieval craftsmen who built the great cathedrals signed nothing. The monks who illuminated the manuscripts put no name on the cover. Aquinas wrote the Summa not to establish himself as a genius but to set out the truth as clearly as possible. The obsession with authorship, with who made this and whether the making was sufficiently human, is a modern inheritance, a Romantic idol. It places the creature at the center where only the Creator belongs.
The real question is never what tool you used. The real question is whether the truth reached the soul that needed it. If the message of eternal life reaches one person who was walking toward despair, God is not going to ask whether you typed every word yourself.
Use every tool Providence places in your hands. Use it well. Use it honestly. And then, as I am doing now, say so.
*This response was written with the help of AI Claude.*
“ This response was written with the help of AI Claude.
We could tell.
No you couldn’t.
This is such a beautiful tribute to your Nana. Bless your heart for keeping her memories alive, and sharing it with us.
Beautiful. Claude is the thing you know. And YOUR Obit is the thing you feel❤️
Like you said, "all cope with grief differently". Also you seem to be making assumptions why he chose to do what he did. One of the things I find sad around someone's passing away and the rituals around it, is that so much of the talk is about form of everything around, as if it is not hard enough to deal with the grief in the first place. To even find the courage to publicly speak about it, or to have to think about the formal stuff that comes with it. I am not saying we should approve everything blindly, but to publicly seek confirmation of whatever you think of that other than a person's death and all the grief that comes with it. Well, it never ceases to amaze me. Her death is first and foremost about her, and then about her loved ones grief, that is an order of magnitude away from all the emotions that are not about her passing away, but of all the second order things around it: whether the obituary was beautiful, whether john should have been invited, the color of the coffin, the stuttering of the reverent, someones phone going off, the fact that my informal obituary was much better than yours, who Nana loved better, the cost of the funeral. Have respect for someone's grief, and if you have questions, have the courage to talk to them rather then publicly venting your opinion with pictures and all.
As someone who experienced grief and loss, I'll be infuriated too if I were in your shoes. This only implied that AI can't write anything. It can express feelings immensely, but it cannot capture the nuances of real human feelings and experiences.
She reminds me of my late grandma - just feisty enough
Hello Daisy and nice to meet you! My father passed away in April of 2025, and I too would have been upset if any family member, relative, or community member used AI! Yes, AI can be useful in some contexts, but an obituary is not one of them, especially if he has written novels before. For my dad, we chose my youngest sister to write it, because, besides being the best writer in the family, she was also the one who spent the most time with him. Thank you for telling us about your Nana. 👏
Hermoso! El obituario lo escribiste vos y para muchas más personas. Creo que tu abuela te guió para que a pesar de que exista Claude y gente como tu tío, los recuerdos siguen existiendo y generan esa comunidad que nunca va a alcanzar la IA. Las palabras laten porque la vida de tu abuela lo sigue haciendo en vos. Imposible de traducir, imposible. Con este tremendo homenaje, cada uno de tus lectores va a saber quién era Linda, y cómo descansaba feliz después de ver volar los pájaros en el cielo.