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Respect is not owed to someone just because they are dead. That being said, I would not have written this obituary for anyone. No matter what horrible deeds the person may have committed, they are still a person. It would not, I think, make me any better than them, or make me a better person generally, if I wrote them such an obituary. If someone is disrespectful to you, that does not mean the best response is to be disrespectful back.
On a personal note, when my father died, I wrote him a letter, which I placed in his coffin. I said in it all that I felt I would have liked to say more clearly when he was living, with regards to who he was, what his presence had meant to me in my life, and how I understood why things had been the way they had. My father was a complicated man, but I still loved him. I still miss him, 7 years later.
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Whether we write or speak or do but look
We are ever unapparent. What we are
Cannot be transfused into word or book.
Our soul from us is infinitely far.
However much we give our thoughts the will
To be our soul and gesture it abroad,
Our hearts are incommunicable still.
In what we show ourselves we are ignored.
The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming.
Unto our very selves we are abridged
When we would utter to our thought our being.
We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,
And each to each other dreams of others' dreams.
Fernando Pessoa, 1918
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