Eulogy Examples for a Son
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What is different about writing for a son
A eulogy for a parent is a summing up. There is a shape for it, and everyone in the room has heard that shape before. There is no shape for this. Nobody in that building expects you to have found the right words, and nobody is grading you. What the room actually needs is much smaller than what you are imagining: it needs to hear his mother or his father say his name out loud, and then say two or three true things about him.
Be careful with the summing up, because a son’s life usually was not finished. There was a lease, a job he was four months into, a deck half built, a trip booked for October. People will tell you that he packed a lifetime into the years he had. They mean it kindly and most families come to resent it later, because it is not true. He was getting started. Saying that plainly is more honest than rounding his life up into a completed shape, and it is easier to say than you think.
If he left a wife or a partner and children, the order of the first minute matters more here than anywhere else. A parent’s grief for a son is enormous and it can accidentally take him back from the family he built. Say her name. Say the children’s names. Say out loud that this is their loss first. The room will be watching for whether you do it, and it settles something for everyone when you do.
Sons often die in ways people lower their voices about: a wreck, an overdose, a suicide, a deployment. You have three respectable choices. Say nothing about it, say one clause, or say it plainly and then move on. What does not work is a eulogy that turns into a warning, an argument, or an explanation. If you name it, name it once, and then go back to him. He is the subject.
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, from a mother for a son of twenty-four
≈2½ minutes · 316 words · spoken by his mother
My son was Caleb Andrew Prewitt. He was twenty-four. I am going to say his whole name once, because I only ever used all three of them when he was in trouble, and I want to hear it in a room where nobody is in trouble.
I’m Denise. I’m his mother.
Caleb was in his second year at Vantage Electric. He had a truck he was still paying off and a decal in the back window that had nothing to do with electrical work. He was saving for a house he had already found on the internet and shown me twice. He had a fantasy football draft on his calendar for August.
I am telling you the unfinished things on purpose. People keep saying he packed a lot into twenty-four years, and I know how kindly it is meant. He didn’t. He was getting started. He was right in the middle of it.
Here is what I want you to keep.
He called me on his drive home. Not every day. Tuesdays and Thursdays, because those were the long jobs and he got bored. Fourteen minutes, roughly, about nothing at all. About a man at work named Duane, and a sandwich place he had strong opinions on.
He was good to his sister in a way a lot of brothers are not. When Rachel’s engagement ended in March, he drove three hours, slept on her floor, and did not mention it to me until June.
He was not tidy. He was late to everything. He could not be told anything by anybody.
That is my son.
Rachel and Michael and I are going to be all right, slowly. Please do not be careful around us. Say his name when you see us. It is worse when people don’t.
Thank you for filling this room. He would have been embarrassed by it, and he would have counted.
Four and a half minutes, from a father for a son of fifty-two who left a family of his own
≈4½ minutes · 617 words · spoken by his father
I’m Walter Marchetti. Ted was my son. I am eighty-one years old, and I want to say the obvious thing out loud at the start so that nobody in this room has to carry it for me. This is the wrong way around. It has been the wrong way around all week and it is going to stay that way. There is nothing to be done about it and I am not asking anyone to fix it.
Now. Before anything else.
Ted was Marisa’s husband for twenty-six years, and he was Nicholas’s father and Grace’s father, and this is their loss first. Marisa, every person in this church knows what you have done these last fourteen months. If you cannot hear it today, I will say it again in a month, and the month after that.
Theodore Walter Marchetti was born in 1974, at four in the morning, and he was not in a hurry then either. He was the second of our three. He was the easy one, which is a thing parents say about a child and find out later was not free.
He was not a student. I say that plainly because I have sat through eulogies in this church that turned an ordinary man into a remarkable one, and Ted would have walked out. He scraped through Cabot High. He worked two summers at the marina. He went to Larkin Plumbing at twenty because his uncle got him in, and he was still there thirty-two years later, except that by then his name was on the second truck.
Here is the thing I did not understand about my son until I was about seventy.
I spent his twenties waiting for him to want more. I would say things to him about it. Peggy would tell me to leave the boy alone, and I would not leave him alone. And what he was doing the whole time I was waiting for him to become something was building the thing that half of you sitting here have called at ten o’clock at night. He came out. He always came out. He charged people what the job cost and not a dollar over it, and there are three families in this room he never charged at all, and he never told me that. I found it out on Tuesday, from Dale Furman, in a funeral home parking lot.
That was the shape of him. He did not report on himself.
He took Nicholas fishing every May in weather that did not deserve it. He kept his mother’s car running for the last eleven years of her life and pretended it was nothing. He answered the telephone by saying “Yep.” Not hello. Just yep.
This last year was hard. I am not going to describe it, because the people it happened to are sitting in the front row and they do not need to hear it again from me. I will say that he was decent about it, in the way he was decent about everything, which was without any commentary. In February he told me not to make a fuss at his funeral. Well.
Ted, I was your father for fifty-two years and I did not run out of things to say to you in time. That is mine to carry and I will carry it. You were a good man, and you were better at it than I ever was.
Thank you all for coming. There is food in the hall. Marisa did not ask a single person for any of it, and about forty of you brought it anyway, which is exactly the kind of thing my son used to do to other people.
Ninety seconds, from a mother for a son who was sick for a long time
≈90 seconds · 198 words · spoken by his mother
I’m Ruth. Jamie was my son.
I am going to say two true things and then I am going to sit down.
The first is that Jamie was sick for eleven years, and it was the kind of sick that people lower their voices about. I am not going to lower my voice. He had a disease. He fought it longer and harder than anybody in this room knows, including me, and on the fourth of June it took him.
The second is that he had nineteen months. From the October before last until this spring. In those nineteen months he came to Sunday dinner, he got his license back, he apologized to his sister properly, in person and sober, and he laughed at my jokes again. I have those nineteen months. Nobody can take them off me, and I am not going to let the last eleven days stand in for the whole of him.
He was funny. He was gentle with animals and with old people. He had a terrible singing voice and he used it constantly.
That is what I have.
Jamie, I am proud of you. I was proud of you the whole time.
Lines that carry weight
“He was twenty-four. I’m going to say that number once, and then I’m going to talk about him.”
For a son who died young. It puts the fact in the room so nobody is waiting for it, and then it hands the speech back to him instead of to his age.
“This is the wrong way around.”
The plainest acknowledgement of the inversion, and it lands. Say it once, near the start, and then move on. A whole eulogy built on it becomes about the unfairness rather than about him.
“He was in the middle of something.”
Follow it with the lease, the job, the trip in October. This is the honest version of what people mean when they say a life was cut short.
“Before anything else: he was Marisa’s husband, and Nicholas and Grace’s dad, and this is their loss first.”
A parent handing the room back to the family the son built. Say it in the first minute, by name. Everyone is watching for it.
“He lived more in thirty years than most people do in eighty.”
A cliché worth avoiding, however kindly it is meant. He did not choose thirty. Families tend to hear it as a consolation prize a year later, and some never forgive the line.
“God needed another angel.”
Avoid this one, especially for a son. Parents in that room will hear it as a reason, and there is not one. If faith belongs in the speech, use his faith: the church, the hymn, the verse he had underlined.
“Say his name when you see us. It’s worse when people don’t.”
The single most useful instruction you can give a room. Families report that it changes how people behave toward them for months afterward.
“He had a disease, and I’m not going to lower my voice about it.”
For a death from addiction, when the family wants it named. One sentence, said levelly, then straight back to who he was. It ends the whispering without making the eulogy about the illness.
“I’m his mother. That’s the only qualification I have and it’s the only one I need.”
A way to start when you do not know how to introduce yourself. It also quietly tells the room why this is going to be hard to listen to.
“I’m not going to get through this, and I’m going to do it anyway.”
Honest, and it buys you every pause you need for the next four minutes. Say it and the room stops holding its breath for you.
Delivering it
- Decide now who takes the pages · Pick a person, hand them a printed copy the night before, and tell the funeral director their name. Many parents cannot finish, and knowing there is someone standing by is usually the reason you do.
- Write down the unfinished thing · The apartment, the certification he was two exams from, the deck, the tickets for October. One sentence of that is truer than a paragraph about how much he fit into his life.
- Ask two of his friends for one story each · You know your son from the inside of a house. His friends knew the man he chose to be everywhere else. Quoting one of them out loud is completely normal: “His friend Duane told me this on Tuesday.”
- Write the clause about how he died, or decide not to · Do this at the kitchen table, not at the lectern. Either “he was sick for eleven years” or nothing at all. What goes wrong is deciding in the moment and then saying more than you meant to in front of two hundred people.
- Name his wife and children in the first minute · By name, out loud, before you say anything about your own loss. It costs you fifteen seconds and it prevents the one thing a grieving in-law never forgets.
- Print it at 16 point, one side, unstapled, numbered · Your hands will shake and you will not be able to read your normal print through tears. Numbered loose pages are also what makes it possible for someone else to pick up where you left off.
- You are allowed to do less than you think · Three sentences and a thank you is a whole eulogy. You are also allowed to write it and have somebody else read it, or to say nothing at all and let the minister speak. No one in that building expects anything of you.
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 a parent give the eulogy for their son?
How long should a eulogy for a son be?
Do I have to say how he died?
How do I talk about him without taking him back from his wife and children?
My son and I were estranged. What do I say?
Should his children hear it?
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.