Eulogy Examples for a Husband
On this page
What is different about writing for a husband
The person best placed to write this is the person least able to deliver it. Everyone else at the service goes home to someone. You go home to the house. That is the real difficulty of a spouse’s eulogy, and it is not fixed by writing better sentences. It is fixed by writing shorter ones and planning ahead for the moment your voice goes.
The second difficulty is that a marriage is private and a eulogy is public. You know things about him that nobody in that room knows, and some of them stay yours. Choose what you are willing to hand over. A wife who says three true, unremarkable things, like how he made the coffee, what he said on the phone and how he was in a hospital waiting room, has given people more than a full account would.
There is a particular trap with men of a certain generation: describing him by his function. He provided. He worked hard. He never complained. All of that may be true, and none of it separates him from anyone else. The work does matter, but only if you say what he was like inside it: how he talked to the new kid, what he took his boots off for, which part of the job he was quietly proud of.
If this is a second marriage and his children from the first are in the front row, the eulogy has to cover the whole of his life and not only the years you had. Say something about the years before you as though they belong to him, because they do. Handled in the first thirty seconds, it settles the room. Left unhandled, everyone spends the eulogy waiting for it.
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.
Two and a half minutes, spoken by his wife after a long marriage
≈2½ minutes · 323 words · spoken by his wife
Ray and I were married forty-six years. People keep telling me that is a long time. It was not.
He was Raymond on the paperwork and Ray to everybody else. He carried a mail route on the east side for thirty-one years, in a town where he knew which dogs to worry about and which ones only wanted the attention. He knew who was sick. He knew which houses to knock on when the mail started stacking up. Four people from his route came to his retirement party, and he pretended he was not pleased about it for the rest of that year.
He was not a talker. If you asked Ray how he was doing, you got “can’t complain,” and that was the whole report. But he showed up. He drove Denise to six o’clock swim practice for six years and never once suggested she quit. He rebuilt my mother’s porch steps the week after she fell and never mentioned it to her, or to me, or to anyone.
What I want to tell you is what he was like at home, because most of you did not see that part. He made the coffee. Every morning for forty-six years he brought me a cup before he poured his own, and he sat on the edge of the bed and told me the weather like I could not have looked out the window myself. That was the whole ceremony. I would give anything for one more of those mornings.
He was sick a long time and he was not brave about it, and I loved him more for that than for almost anything else. He was honest. He said it hurt when it hurt. He said he was frightened when he was frightened. Forty-six years and he never once performed for me.
Thank you for coming. He would have said you did not have to. He would have been glad you did.
Four and a half minutes, a second marriage, with his children in the front row
≈4½ minutes · 613 words · spoken by his second wife
I need to start by saying something to Kevin and Jill. Your father had a whole life before I met him, and it was a good one, and nothing I say this morning takes any of it away. I had twenty-two years with him. You had all of them.
Dale grew up in a house with no furnace, which he brought up whenever anyone touched a thermostat. He left school at seventeen and went to work for a heating outfit run by a man he described as the meanest teacher he ever had. By twenty-six he had his own truck with his name on the side of it. He painted the letters himself, they came out crooked, and he never fixed them, because by the time he could afford to, people knew the crooked letters.
He worked in other people’s basements for forty-one years. That is not a glamorous life. But I went out with him a few times after we married, and I want to tell you what he was like down there. He took his boots off at the door of a stranger’s house. He explained what was wrong twice. Once properly, and once in the way that let you keep your dignity if you had not followed it the first time. And if the customer was old, or on their own, or counting money in their head while he talked, the bill came out smaller. He never told me he did that. I found out from his bookkeeper, who had been furious about it for thirty years.
He lost Marianne in 1999. Kevin, you were fourteen. Jill, you were eleven. I met your father five years after that, at a fundraiser neither of us wanted to attend, and the first thing he said to me was that the chicken was dry. The second thing he said was that he had two kids and they came first, and if that was a problem we could shake hands and enjoy the evening. It was not a problem. I have never in my life been given clearer terms.
We had twenty-two years. We were not young and we knew exactly what we had. We took the camper to the same three places over and over because he saw no reason to gamble. He read every word of the newspaper, including the parts he disagreed with, which was most of them. He could not sit through a movie. He could sit for four hours in a lawn chair at a swim meet in which a grandchild swam for ninety seconds.
He was not a soft man and I am not going to make him one this morning. He had his opinions and he kept them. He and Kevin went through a long stretch of years where they mostly talked about trucks, because trucks were safe. But at the end, in that room, the two of them worked it out. Not with a speech, because neither one of them would have survived a speech. Kevin just sat there day after day, and Dale let him. I watched a man learn something new at seventy-three. It is the best thing I ever saw him do.
He asked me not to make a fuss today. I want to be accurate about the wording. He said, “Don’t let them go on.”
So I will stop. Dale was a good tradesman, a stubborn father, and the second great piece of luck in my life. He would want me to tell you the coffee is at the back, and to please take the sandwiches home with you, because he could not stand waste.
Thank you for being here for him.
Ninety seconds, when you can only manage a little
≈90 seconds · 209 words · short enough to get through
I am not going to speak long. He would not have, and I am not sure I can.
Walter and I were married fifty-three years. We met at a bus stop in the rain, and neither of us ever improved the story, because there was not much to it. He asked if I wanted his newspaper to hold over my head. I said no. He handed it to me anyway.
That was him for fifty-three years. He did not ask twice. He just did the thing.
He taught high school shop for thirty years, and there are men in this room today who can frame a set of stairs because of him. He kept a list in his wallet of every student of his who went into the trades. There are eighty-one names on it. It is on the table by the door if you want to see whether you are on it.
He was patient with everybody except himself.
I do not have anything wise to say about losing him. It has been nine days. But I know he would want you to eat something and to check on each other, so please do that.
Thank you for coming. He would have shaken every one of your hands.
Lines that carry weight
“I am going to keep this short, because he would have.”
The best opening a widow can use. It sets expectations, gives you a way out, and is almost always true of a quiet man.
“He was my husband for thirty-one years and I still cannot say that in the past tense.”
Honest about where you actually are. Works in the first thirty seconds, and buys you a moment before you have to steady yourself.
“You knew him at work. I knew him at six in the morning. I want to tell you about that man.”
Names the one thing only you can offer. Follow it with a specific domestic detail, not a general statement.
“He was not an easy man, and I am not going to stand here and make him one.”
Permission to be truthful. Only use it if the next sentence is warm. The honesty is the affection, but the room needs to hear the second half straight away.
“He would have hated this much attention.”
Nearly always true and nearly always welcome. It gives the room a small, safe laugh in the first minute.
“To our children: your father is in all three of you, and I can see it from here.”
For a wife speaking with her children in the front row. Say it looking at them, then move on quickly. It will be the hardest sentence in the piece.
“Thank you for taking care of him, and for taking care of me these last few weeks.”
A closing that turns outward toward the room and lets you finish on something you can say without breaking.
“He was my rock.”
Worth skipping. It has been said at so many services that it no longer reaches anyone. If he steadied you, say how: “he was the one who stayed calm at the hospital, every single time.”
“He fought a courageous battle.”
Avoid it. Battle language quietly suggests the outcome had something to do with effort. “He was sick for two years and he was honest about it” is truer and kinder.
“He always put his family first.”
Too general to land. Replace it with the one occasion that proves it: the shift he gave up, the trip he canceled, the person he drove to treatment at five in the morning.
Delivering it
- Have a second reader standing by · Give a printed copy to someone steady, a son-in-law or a friend or the funeral director, and tell them out loud in advance: if I stop, come up and finish it. Then it is a plan rather than a failure. Most of the time you will not need them, and knowing they are there is what lets you get through it.
- You do not have to speak at all · Writing the eulogy and having your daughter or the minister read it is a complete and honorable choice. Nobody in that room is judging you for it, and several of them are quietly relieved they were not asked.
- Print it large · Eighteen point, double spaced, one side of the paper only, pages numbered. Crying makes small type impossible, and turning a page over is where people lose their place.
- Say his name early and often · “My husband” is a role. Ray is a person. Using his name keeps the eulogy about him rather than about your loss, which is the difference between a room grieving with you and a room watching you grieve.
- Three details, not thirty · One thing from his work, one from home, one nobody expects. A whole life will not fit and does not need to. The three specifics get repeated in the parking lot afterward; the summary never does.
- Give the last illness one sentence · However long and hard the end was, it is a small part of who he was. One honest line about it, placed near the end, and then go back to the man.
- Have someone check the years and the names · Grief makes arithmetic unreliable. Ask a child or his sister to read the draft for dates, employers, and the order of the grandchildren. The correction hurts much more when it arrives after the service.
- Decide in advance what stays private · There will be one story you love that belongs only to the two of you. You are allowed to keep it. Say something else instead and hold that one back. It will still be yours in ten years.
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
Should I give the eulogy for my own husband?
How long should a eulogy for a husband be?
Is it all right to say our marriage was hard at times?
What do I say if this was a second marriage and his children are there?
Can I read something instead of writing my own eulogy?
What do I do if I break down in the middle?
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.