Obituary Writer's Advice on How You Can Have the Last Word Even After You're Gone: 'Start Early'

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Before you die, consider who'll have the last word, says author James R. Hagerty.

One idea is to write your own obituary. Intimidating? You bet. Especially if you don't think of yourself as a writer, as few do — and who wants to tempt fate by drafting a final farewell?

But listen up, says Hagerty, 66, a Pittsburgh-based features and obit reporter for The Wall Street Journal: Those wonderful stories that make up a life are often told poorly in your absence. Worse still, sometimes others never knew them at all, so your stories die with you if you don't write them down or speak up first.

There's also this benefit, he says: Whatever your age or health, an inventory of your life so far can help you decide if you're on the path you intended, and if you aren't, lead you to another.

"The problem is the word obituary," says Hagerty, whose new book, Yours Truly: An Obituary Writer's Guide to Telling Your Story, offers guidance for compiling your stories or collecting them from those you love while you can.

"I don't think people need to focus on how these memories will be used," he tells PEOPLE. "They may be used in an obituary, or they may be used in some kind of a family history booklet. They may be a video, they may be a recording, they may be a website, they may be an annotated photo album."

"We take precautions for what's going to happen to our money after we die," he says. "Why don't we also think about preserving our stories?"

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Hagerty, who estimates he's reported more than 1,000 obits, says children of the deceased, while thrilled to have their loved ones remembered, many times "couldn't answer even simple questions. You say, 'I see your dad went to a dental school, but then he became an organic farmer. Why did he decide to do that?' They said, 'Oh, that's a good question. I never asked him.'"

Courtesy James R. Hagerty (2) Author James R. Hagerty, at right, and his new book Yours Truly

He pleads guilty himself – sort of – in the wake of the death of his father, Jack Hagerty, a North Dakota newspaper editor.

The obit the family wrote was "really dull … because it was put together in a hurry after he died and it just has the facts, the jobs he had, the honors he won," Hagerty says. "There was no hint of his personality and nothing to tell you what he was really trying to do in his life, and how it worked out and what he thought about it."

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Hagerty compensated by interviewing his mother, Marilyn Hagerty, about her life. "She was very easy to talk to, and had a great memory," he says. "I thought, well, she's 79 years old; how much more can happen? Well, it turned out a lot more happened with my mom."

In fact, she later wrote a rave review of the Olive Garden restaurant in her local paper that went viral, attracting notice from Anthony Bourdain, who defended her against critics, published a book of her columns, and then wrote the forward to it. (Hagerty's mom is still a newspaper columnist at age 96.)

"Your life is not over at 79," he says. "But my idea is also that people should start early, saving some of their stories and thinking about how their life is going, and take note along the way, because it helps."

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Several fee-charging services exist to help, among them: Storyworth, which sends regular prompts to jog recollections that can be compiled into a book; No Story Lost, which interviews its users to create memento coffee table tomes; and Vita Life Story, which curates recordings, personal photos, family recipes and the like into digital memoirs. StoryCorps also offers free audio recording services for stories archived at the Library of Congress, and a list of questions to help guide conversations.

But Hagerty offers his own starter questions that can be asked and answered over the kitchen table.

"Start by going back to the beginning: where did you grow up?," he says. "What did your parents do for a living? When you were in school, what did you want to do with your life? What kinds of things did you do in school? And then how did you decide to study this or that or start this career, and how did you decide to get married, or not to get married? When you got this job doing X, where did you go from there? Did you stick with this career or did you change? Why? And did things turn out the way you expected them to, or were you surprised?"

He continues: "What were some of the real obstacles you had to overcome in your life? And what were some of the biggest mistakes you made? And what did you learn from those mistakes? What were the best things that happened to you? What were the strangest things that happened to you? What were the worst things that happened to you, and how did you cope with those?"

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To those who protest "I'm not famous, who's going to care?," he says: "Your kids might care, your grandchildren might care. You have no idea who might care." For instance, Anne Frank had no fame in her day, he says, "but it's a good thing [she] wrote down what was happening" in her young life.

"Often with our families, we're fighting about some current thing, some tension in our lives," he says. "If we would find some safer topics -- like, what was it like when you were growing up? Or, how did you meet mom? Why did you decide to get married? -- you might find more common ground and understanding."

"With people who are reluctant, you just do it in little bits and pieces rather than make it sound like a big project," he says. "Just find 10 minutes here or there and ask one or two questions rather than putting them through a whole grilling. You could have some great conversations with your parents and your brothers, sisters, friends, if you did this periodically throughout life, because we often just don't go back and review why things are the way they are."

But even in creating your own chronicle for possible future consumption, don't be put off by anyone else's indifference in the present, he adds.

"My kids, they're 19 and 22, they really are not interested in dad's history," Hagerty says. "I get that. I was the same way at that age. But I still like to put down my story. If someday somebody is interested, it will be there. If not, I'm not going to worry about it. I got value out of it myself just by thinking about my life, and what anybody could say about me after I'm gone."

"That made me think I really should do more volunteer work, more stuff for other people," he says. "Thinking about your life is a good way to inspire yourself to try a little bit harder."