This study adopts a corpus-based genre analysis approach to a non-academic genre, that of obituaries. Prior corpus-based genre research has focused on rhetorical move structure and phraseological characteristics within research articles but limited attention has been given to a non-academic genre, or specifically to obituaries. This study aims to fill this gap by conducting a comprehensive corpus-based analysis of the rhetorical moves, phrase-frames and syntactic complexity of obituary writing. Adopting a function-first approach, the variability of rhetorical moves and phraseological patterns across five media and text types is investigated. This study enhances our understanding of how obituaries achieve their communicative goals and the variation which occurs according to text-type and media-type, while still maintaining the characteristics of the genre. It also compares characteristics between rhetorical moves, illustrating variation between moves and among moves between media- and text-types. This research has significant implications for the study of non-academic genres, offering insights into the adaptability and complexity of genre conventions across different contexts and audiences, not least by incorporating a multimodal aspect to the analysis.