This article uses corpus linguistic methods to analyse a corpus of over 55,000 obituaries and cards of thanks from Saxony and almost 120,000 associated digital condolence book entries from the period 2009–2022. Around 42,000 announcements were enriched with metadata on the age and gender of the deceased, so that age-typical lexical patterns can be determined, and diachronic developments can be traced. Following on from cultural-analytical studies on obituaries, addressing in the 2nd person singular is analysed in greater detail as a characteristic of the announcement type of the ‘open letter to the deceased’, which can also be found in the digital condolence book entries. Both text types, the announcement and the condolence book entries, deliver a rich picture of cultural interpretations of death and mourning at the interface of analogue and digital communication.