Eulogy Examples for a Grandmother
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What a grandchild can say that her children cannot
A grandmother’s funeral usually has two griefs in it. Her children lost their mother. Her grandchildren lost the person whose house was the safe one. Those are not the same loss, and the eulogy usually falls to a grandchild for a plain reason: her children cannot get through it. If you are the one holding the pages, you are not being asked to speak for the family. You are being asked to speak so they don’t have to.
That gives you a freedom you should use. You can say the fond, funny, slightly disrespectful thing about her that a daughter could not say about her own mother without it landing wrong. You can admit she had opinions and shared them. You can say the house smelled like something specific. Grandchildren remember a grandmother in objects and habits more than in achievements, and that is exactly the right material.
It also means you probably did not know her whole life. You met her at sixty or seventy, already finished, already softened. There will be people in that room who knew her at twenty-five and remember someone tougher and less patient. You do not have to reconcile the two. Say what you actually saw, name that you only got the last chapter, and let her friends keep the earlier ones.
Be careful with two things. First, the survivors: a long-lived grandmother can leave twenty grandchildren and fifty great-grandchildren, and a missed name is remembered for years, so give numbers instead of a roll call. Second, the last years. If there was dementia, or a nursing home, or a decline everyone watched, say it once, plainly, and move on. One honest sentence makes the rest of the eulogy believable. Three of them turn it into a medical report.
Complete eulogies
Each of these is written to be read aloud. Everyone in them is invented, so take whichever fits and replace the specifics. The shape is what you are borrowing.
Eulogy for a grandmother, from a granddaughter speaking for all the grandchildren
≈2½ minutes · 344 words
I’m Hannah. I’m the oldest of Nana’s eleven grandchildren, which is the only reason I’m the one standing here. The rest of them helped me write it.
Her name was Ada Mullane. To the eleven of us she was Nana, and to the seventeen great-grandchildren she was Big Nana, which she pretended not to like.
Nana was born in Sedalia in 1932 and lived in that town her whole life, in three houses, all of them within a mile of each other. She married our grandfather in 1953. She worked the counter at the dime store on Ohio Avenue, then twenty-two years at the county clerk’s office, and she could still tell you the property lines of half the county.
Here is what the cousins wanted said.
She kept a jar of quarters by the door for the ice cream truck, and she never once made you ask.
She played cards for money. A nickel a hand. She took it.
She had a phone on the kitchen wall with a cord long enough to reach the back step, and if you called her she would talk to you for an hour about nothing while she snapped beans.
She wrote letters. Real letters, in cursive, on the paper with the birds on it, to every one of us at college, once a month, for four years. Mine are in a shoebox. I have read them all this week.
Nana was not a soft woman. She told you when your shirt was wrinkled. She had views about how other people raised their children and she shared them. But nobody left her house hungry, and she never said one unkind word about our mothers to us. Not once. I have thought about how hard that must have been.
Mom, Aunt Jo, Uncle Ray. We know today is a different day for you than it is for us. You lost your mother. We only lost our Nana, and that is heavy enough.
Nana, the jar is empty and the beans are snapped. Thank you. We will see you.
Eulogy for a grandmother, from a grandson at a church service
≈4½ minutes · 614 words
Good morning. I’m Marcus Pryor, and Odessa Pryor was my grandmother. In this church most of you called her Mother Pryor. At the house on Calloway Street, twenty-six grandchildren called her Grandma. There are now fifty-one great-grandchildren, and I want the record to show that the number changed twice while we were writing the program.
Grandma was born in Hawkinsville in 1929, the eighth of nine. She came to Macon at seventeen with a paper sack and a job waiting at a laundry. She married our granddaddy, Curtis Pryor, in 1950, and they had fifty-eight years.
She joined this church in 1951 and she was in it almost every Sunday for the next seventy-four years. She served on the usher board for thirty-one of them. She cooked for the repast after funerals for families she had never met, and more than once for people who had not been kind to her. When I asked her about that she said, “The chicken doesn’t know.”
I want to tell you two things you would not get from the program.
The first is that she was strict in a way that has gone out of style, and every one of us is grateful for it now. Grandma’s house had rules. You spoke to adults. You did not walk through her front room in your shoes. If you slept at her house on Saturday you were in this building on Sunday, and there was no version of that conversation where you won. She raised six children and helped raise most of us, and she did not do it by being agreeable.
The second is that she was funny, and only some of you ever got to see it. She had a running commentary during the announcements that could get a whole pew in trouble. She kept the ushers in line and she teased the pastor. She once told me my haircut looked like a decision I had made in a hurry.
My grandmother buried her husband, two of her sisters, and her son Curtis Jr. She did not talk much about any of it. What she did instead was get up. That is the closest thing to a philosophy she ever handed me. When my marriage ended I drove three hours and sat at her kitchen table and told her the whole thing, and she listened for a long time without saying anything, and then she said, “All right. Now you get up.”
The last few years were slow. Her eyes went first, then her knees, and she was angrier about the knees. She kept asking who was coming Sunday. Somebody was always coming Sunday. That is what fifty-one great-grandchildren are for.
Scripture says, Well done, thou good and faithful servant. My grandmother would tell me not to go putting words in the Lord’s mouth. But I have carried that verse around all week and I keep landing in the same place. She was faithful. She was in this room, in that seat, for seventy-four years. She fed people. She raised people who went on to raise people. Whatever it is that gets counted at the end, she has some.
To her children. Mama, Aunt Bernice, Uncle Ray, Aunt Loretta, Uncle Wendell. We are standing right behind you today and we will be there next month too, when the casseroles stop and the house gets quiet. That is when we will really be needed and we know it.
To my cousins, all twenty-five of you, thank you for the phone calls this week. We did not know we still knew how to talk to each other that much.
Grandma, we have it from here. Go on and rest.
Short eulogy for a grandmother, for someone who does not want to speak long
≈90 seconds · 194 words
My name is Kayla. Rosalind was my father’s mother, and I called her Grandma, and I am going to keep this short, because she would have wanted us to get to the food.
She was ninety-one. She had a small life on purpose. One town, one house, one hairdresser for forty years, the same seat at bingo on Wednesday nights.
What I have is her hands. She taught me to roll a pie crust when I was six. I still do it exactly the way she did it, and I still get the edge wrong in exactly the way she got it wrong, and it is still better than anybody else’s.
These last two years she did not always know who I was. I want to say that out loud once, because it was hard and pretending otherwise does not honor her. It also did not take her from us. She still held your hand. She still said thank you. Whatever else she had lost, she had not lost her manners, and I found that funny for a while, and then I found it beautiful.
Grandma, thank you for the pie crust. Rest now.
Lines that carry weight
“I’m Hannah, the oldest of her eleven grandchildren, which is the only reason I’m the one standing here.”
An opening line. In a room with four generations, half the people cannot place you. Name yourself, your position in the family, and why you are the one speaking, then move on.
“To her children she was Mom. To the eleven of us she was Nana.”
Useful early, because it sets up the two different griefs in the room without you having to explain them.
“You lost your mother today. We only lost our grandmother, and that is heavy enough.”
Turn and say this to her children once, near the end. It is the single line most likely to help them, and it costs you nothing.
“Nobody ever left her house hungry.”
True of an enormous number of grandmothers, which is why it means very little on its own. Keep it only if the next sentence names the actual dish, or the drawer, or the plate she sent home with you.
“She was the glue that held this family together.”
Worn almost through. If it is genuinely true, prove it instead: the Sunday dinner she never canceled, the birthdays she called, the cousins who only met at her table.
“Heaven gained an angel.”
Worth avoiding. It reads as a greeting card, and it is not what most Christian traditions actually teach about the dead. If you want a line of faith, borrow one from Scripture or from a hymn she sang.
“Ninety-four years, and she used every one of them.”
Good for a very long life. Plain, unsentimental, and it gives the room something to be glad about without pretending today is not sad.
“The last two years were hard. They were not the whole story.”
The cleanest way to acknowledge dementia, a nursing home, or a long decline. Say it once. Do not describe the illness.
“She raised six children and then helped raise most of us.”
For a grandmother who did the job twice. Say it flatly. The arithmetic does the work.
“Go on and rest, Grandma. We have it from here.”
A closing that works in almost any room, religious or not. Short lines land better than long ones when your voice is going.
Delivering it
- Call her children before you write it · You are speaking about their mother. A five-minute call tells you what they would rather you left out, and prevents the one sentence a family remembers for the wrong reason.
- Text the cousins and ask for one line each · Ask for the first thing that comes to mind, not their best writing. You will get the ice cream jar, the card games, the phone cord. Three of those beat any paragraph you could compose on your own.
- Use the name you actually called her · Nana, Mamaw, Gram, Gigi, Abuela, Bubbe, Mother Pryor. Say her legal name once at the top so the room knows who you mean, then use the family name for the rest.
- Give the number, never the roll call · “Twenty-six grandchildren and fifty-one great-grandchildren” is warm and safe. Reading fifty names is long, and if one gets missed, that is what the family will remember.
- Handle the decline in one sentence · If she had dementia or a hard last year, say so plainly and once, then go back to who she was. Everyone in that room already knows. What they need from you is the rest of her.
- Print it big, on one side of the paper · Sixteen point, double spaced, numbered pages, nothing on the back. Do not use index cards. Under emotion you will lose your place, and a stapled script is easy to hand to someone else.
- Ask one person to be your backup · Give a cousin a copy before the service and show them where to pick up. Knowing there is a plan makes it much less likely you will need one.
- You are allowed to do less than you think · Ninety true seconds about the letters she wrote you is a better eulogy than four polite minutes about a woman nobody recognizes. Nobody has ever left a funeral wishing the speech had been longer.
The general method, meaning structure, length and how to get through it without breaking down, is in how to write a eulogy, and there are twelve more examples on the main eulogy examples page.
Other relationships
Common questions
Is it all right for a grandchild to give the eulogy instead of one of her children?
How long should a grandchild’s eulogy be?
What if I did not see her much in the last few years?
Should I speak on behalf of all the grandchildren?
Do I mention her dementia or the nursing home?
What if she raised me?
Keep reading
- How to Write a EulogyA step-by-step way to write and deliver a eulogy, including how long it should be, what to say first, and how to get through it.
- Funeral Speech ExamplesShort funeral speech examples for anyone asked to say a few words, including what to do if you are not the main speaker.
- Funeral PoemsPublic-domain funeral poems you can print in a program or on a card, with any cut marked, plus the modern ones families ask for most, listed by title and poet with a note on which you can print.