Why do obituaries give the cause of death? Seems morbid to me.

I was reading the paper today; several people died, as is normal.

Most of the obits had a cause of death (“congestive heart failure”, “a long illness”, “automobile crash”), and the few that didn’t had a phrase like “no cause of death was supplied to this newspaper”.

Why do obituaries (and obituary writers) feel that they need to give a cause of death? It seems unimportant. The person died. End of subject.