The article is concerned with the speech behavior of a modern city inhabitants in the communicative space of the burial-memorial ritual. In the article there is an analysis of the interviews with obituarists considered in terms of their inclusion in the social interaction regarding the death of a famous person. The article answers questions about the communicative situation in which people use the obituary genre: who and under what circumstances writes the obituary, what image of the intended addressee appears in this case, what attitudes and imperatives stand behind a particular utterance, what communicative intention drives the author, how an obituary changes social reality. The paper also raises the question of the professional and personal approach to writing an obituary, the context affecting the statement, the impossibility of expressing the author’s real aims and experiences. In addition, the writing of the obituary is considered as a part of a special type of grief, carried out through the creation of biographical texts about the deceased and inscribing the facts of the deceased’s life into the individual life fate of the obituary author.