How to Write a Eulogy

If you are reading this, someone has died, and someone has asked you to stand up and say something about them. Or maybe nobody asked. Maybe you decided yourself, because it felt wrong to let the service go by without someone saying who they really were. Either way, you are here, and you are probably afraid, and I want to tell you something before we go any further: you can do this.

I have been to a lot of funerals. I am seventy-seven years old and I have buried my husband, my parents, and more friends than I would like to count. I have heard eulogies that were beautiful, and I have heard eulogies that were not, and I have learned that the difference between them has nothing to do with how polished the words are. The difference is whether the person standing up there is telling the truth.

Start with one true thing

Do not start by trying to summarize a whole life. You cannot. Nobody can. Start with one thing you know is true about the person who died. One memory. One habit. One sentence they said that you have never forgotten. The rest of the eulogy will grow from that one true thing the way a garden grows from a single seed. You do not need to plant the whole field at once.

If it was your mother, maybe you start with the way she answered the phone. If it was your father, maybe you start with the sound of his truck in the driveway. If it was a friend, maybe you start with the thing she always ordered at the restaurant where you met for lunch. The specific thing. Not "she was a wonderful person." The thing that made her her.

What to include

A good eulogy does not need to cover everything. It needs to say something real. Most good ones I have heard include some combination of these, though not all of them, and not in any particular order:

Something about who they were at their best: not a list of accomplishments, but a picture of the person in a specific moment. Something about a habit or a phrase or a way of doing things that everyone in the room will recognize. Something honest: a small flaw, a stubbornness, a quirk that made them human and not a saint. Something about what they meant to you, said plainly, without apology. And something about what you believe happens next, if you believe anything, said gently, without preaching.

What to leave out

Leave out anything that would hurt someone sitting in the room. Leave out old grievances. Leave out anything the person who died would not want said in front of their family. Leave out the phrase "they are in a better place" unless you are certain every person in that room would agree with you. Leave out jokes that only half the room will understand. A funeral is not the place to settle anything. It is the place to honor someone, and honoring someone means protecting them even after they are gone.

A eulogy for a mother

The trouble with writing about your mother is that she is too close to see whole. You will try to account for all of her, and you cannot, and the attempt will produce a paragraph that could be about anybody's mother. So do not try. Pick one ordinary thing she did that she never made any fuss about. The way she answered the phone. What she did when you came home upset. Something she said so often that you stopped hearing it until now. And you are allowed to say she was difficult, if she was. A room full of people who knew her will trust you more for it, not less.

A eulogy for a father

Many of us knew our fathers through what they did rather than what they said. If that is true of yours, do not strain to find the words he never used. Tell them what he did instead. The drive he made without being asked. The thing he fixed that did not need fixing. The way he stood at the back of a room where you were being honored, and would not come forward. A father's love is often visible only in the record of his errands, and that record is worth reading aloud. If he did say it, and you have the words, say those. But do not invent them.

A eulogy for a grandmother

When you write a eulogy for a grandmother, you are usually speaking for a group. Cousins, brothers, sisters, all of them holding their own version of her. That is not a burden. It means you can say "we" and have it be true. Your advantage is that grandchildren tend to keep the sensory things: a kitchen, a hymn she hummed off-key, the particular sound of her house. Use one. Your disadvantage is that you likely know less of her long life than her own children do. So ask one of them a question before you write. What was she like at twenty? You will get something you did not have.

A eulogy for a grandfather

Every family has three stories it tells about a grandfather, and everyone at the service has heard all three. You may tell one. Do not tell all three. Then give them something they have not heard, which usually means asking somebody what he was like before he was a grandfather. He was a young man once, with a job and worries and a life that had nothing to do with you. Grandchildren are given the gentlest version of a man. The fuller one is more interesting, and more honoring, and it is generally available for the price of one phone call.

A eulogy for a spouse

I will tell you plainly that this is the hardest one, and I have buried a husband, so I am not guessing at it. The difficulty is not finding something to say. It is that you are the person in that room who has lost the most, and you are the one being asked to steady everybody else. You do not have to. Say less than you think you should. Choose one ordinary evening, the kind you had a thousand of and never thought to notice, and describe it plainly. A marriage is mostly ordinary evenings. Nobody in that room needs you to explain what they meant to you, because they can see it. And if you cannot stand up at all, that is not a failure. Words you wrote and somebody else read are still yours.

If you are writing a Christian eulogy

If the person who died had a faith, and the room shares it, you may say so plainly and you do not need to apologize for it. One verse is enough. Choose the one that actually belonged to them, the one written inside the cover of their Bible or the one they asked for every time they were in the hospital, and not the one that gets read at every funeral because it is the one everybody knows. If you do not know which verse was theirs, ask somebody. Somebody in that family knows.

Two cautions. A eulogy is not a sermon, and a room can feel the moment you cross from honoring a person into preaching at the living. And if the beliefs in the room are mixed, which most rooms are, speak about what they believed rather than what everyone ought to believe. Nobody can argue with you about what somebody loved.

How long

Three to five minutes. That is about 500 to 800 words. It will feel short when you write it and long when you read it aloud, because time moves differently at a lectern than it does at a desk. If you go longer than seven minutes, you are asking too much of the people in the room. They are grieving, and their attention is not what it usually is, and the kindest thing you can do is say what needs to be said and then sit down.

How to get through it

You might cry. That is fine. Bring a glass of water. Pause when you need to. The people in the room are not judging you. They are with you. If you cannot finish, it is all right to hand the paper to someone else and let them read the rest. Nobody will think less of you. They will think more of you, because your tears are evidence that the words you wrote are true.

Practice reading it aloud at home, at least twice. Not to make it perfect. To find the places where your voice will catch, so they do not surprise you. The places where your voice catches are usually the best parts.

An example of what a eulogy sounds like

This is from a eulogy Ruby wrote for a woman named Dorothy, who loved her garden and her grandchildren and the early morning:

Dorothy was the kind of woman who was up before the sun, not because she had somewhere to be, but because the morning was hers and she did not intend to waste it. She made her coffee strong and she drank it on the back steps and she watched the light come across the yard the way some people watch television, with her full attention, as if something important might happen at any moment. And it usually did. A cardinal. A rabbit in the lettuce. The first tomato turning red on the vine. Dorothy noticed things that the rest of us walked past, and she had the good grace not to point it out too often.

That is what a eulogy sounds like when it is telling the truth about a specific person. Not "she was a wonderful woman." She watched the light come across the yard with her full attention. That is the kind of detail that makes the room go quiet, because everyone in the room knows it is true.

If what you need is words to say at the service itself, I have written a prayer for a funeral. And if it is the days after that you are dreading, there is more here on grief.

Ruby writes a short devotional every morning: Scripture, and a few plain words from someone who has been there. You can subscribe. It's free.