How to Write a Eulogy

How long it should be

Nearly everyone writes too much on the first pass. At a funeral people speak at about 130 words a minute, slower than ordinary conversation, because of the pauses. Use that number and you will not run long.

Ask the funeral director or the officiant how much time they have planned for. They will give you a number in about four seconds, and it removes the biggest unknown. If the service already has scripture, two hymns and a slideshow, the eulogy is not the place to add ten minutes. The funeral order of service shows where the eulogy usually sits and what is on either side of it.

The six steps, in one evening

Do these in order. Set a timer for each one. The point of the timer is not speed; it is permission to stop.

1. 1

   Ten minutes: ask two people one question each

   Text or call two people who knew them differently than you did: a sibling, an old coworker, a neighbor. Ask exactly one question: what is the first thing you think of when you think of him? Do not explain that you are writing a eulogy; you will get a speech instead of an answer.

   Write down what they say word for word. Two of the twelve eulogies on our eulogy examples page turn on a detail that came from somebody else.

2. 2

   Twenty minutes: empty your head onto paper

   Not sentences. Fragments. Names, habits, sayings, objects, smells, arguments, the car they drove, the thing they always said on the phone. Do not organize and do not judge any of it. If you write down something that seems too small, keep it, because small is exactly what you are looking for.

   Set a timer and do not stop early. The useful material almost always arrives in the last five minutes.

3. 3

   Five minutes: pick three

   Read the list and circle three items. Not the three most important things about their life, but the three that only you could have written down. A whole eulogy can be built on a notebook, a phone call and a casserole dish.

4. 4

   Thirty minutes: write the middle

   One paragraph per circled item. Say what happened, when, and what it tells you about them. Write badly on purpose. You are not trying to produce finished sentences yet; you are trying to get three true paragraphs onto the page.

   Skip the opening entirely. It is the hardest sentence in the piece and it is much easier to write once you know what it is introducing.

5. 5

   Ten minutes: add the opening and the closing

   One sentence of who you are, then thirty seconds of the frame of their life: born where, married whom, worked at what, for how long. Then, at the end, speak to them directly by name for two lines. Both sections are written out for you further down this page.

6. 6

   Fifteen minutes: read it out loud, with a stopwatch

   Out loud, standing up, in the room you are in. You are listening for two things: sentences you stumble over, and the total time. Cut the stumbles. If it runs long, cut whole paragraphs rather than trimming words from every sentence.

   Then stop for the night. Read it once more in the morning and change no more than three things.

How to start

The first sentence has one job: tell the room who is speaking. Say your name and your relationship, then move. Do not open with a dictionary definition, a famous quotation, or a remark about how difficult it is to be standing there. All three make the room brace itself.

After that sentence, give the room about thirty seconds of plain facts: where they were born, who they married, what they did for work and for how long. It sounds dull written down. Spoken, it settles everybody, including you, and it means nobody spends the rest of your eulogy trying to work out the basics. If you are writing the obituary as well, you already have this paragraph.

The middle: three stories, not thirty virtues

This is the part people remember, and it is the part most first drafts leave out. The instinct under pressure is to write a list of good qualities. Resist it. A quality is an opinion; a story is evidence, and the room draws the conclusion for itself.

The left-hand version could be about anyone. The right-hand one could only be about one woman, and it makes the same point without ever using the word selfless. That is the entire craft of a eulogy.

Four questions that produce stories

• What did they do that nobody else did?
• What did they say so often that it became a family joke?
• When did they help you, on a specific day, in a specific way?
• What object in their house tells you who they were?

The last question is the most productive one. Objects carry more of a person than adjectives do: the truck notebook, the unused dishwasher, the drawer of granola bars. If you get one good object, you usually get the paragraph with it.

How long each paragraph should be

Sixty to a hundred words. Say what happened, then one short line about what it meant. Do not explain the meaning twice. If you have told the story well, the second explanation will sound like you do not trust the room.

How to end

Speak to them, not about them. Turn and address the person by name for the last two lines. It is the oldest move in eulogy writing and it works every time, because it gives the room permission to feel what it has been holding for ten minutes.

Two endings to avoid. The first is a long quotation or poem, which hands your last thirty seconds to somebody else; if you want a poem in the service, ask for it to be read separately, and the funeral poems page has short public-domain pieces suited to that. The second is a promise about how the family will be feeling in a year. You do not know, and they are sitting right there.

When the truth is complicated

Plenty of people are asked to speak about someone who was hard to love, or who died in a way the family has not begun to make sense of. There are workable ways through all of it.

A difficult or distant relationship

Write what was true rather than what should have been true. You can honor a person by describing what they were good at, what they built, and what other people got from them, without claiming a closeness you did not have. One clean sentence, such as he and I did not always find each other easy, costs you nothing and buys the rest of the eulogy credibility. What a eulogy cannot do is settle the argument. Anything that would land as an accusation in front of a hundred people belongs somewhere else.

Addiction, or a long decline

If the room already knows, saying nothing can feel like a second silence on top of the first. Name it once, briefly, without detail, and keep the emphasis on the person rather than the illness. Recovery, when there was some, is worth stating plainly: it is often the thing they were proudest of.

A sudden death, or a death by suicide

Follow the family. Ask the closest surviving relative what they would like said and what they would like left alone, and then do exactly that. In general, describe the life and not the death. Speakers who try to explain a sudden death from the lectern usually wish afterward that they had not, and no explanation given in three minutes has ever helped a family. It is enough to say that the loss makes no sense and that everyone in the room is holding it together.

Dementia in the last years

Speak about the whole life, not the last chapter of it. If you want to acknowledge those years, one sentence about the people who cared for them is usually the kindest form it can take.

If any of this is more than you can carry this week, say so. Tell the family you would rather not speak, offer to write something for someone else to read, or ask the officiant to read it for you. Declining is a normal, ordinary thing that happens at funerals every day.

The read-aloud pass

Do not skip this. Reading a eulogy out loud is the difference between something that works in a room and something that only works on a screen. Stand up and read it at full volume, once the night before and once in the morning.

Then print it. Sixteen-point type, double spaced, one side of the paper only, page numbers in the corner. Never print on both sides, because turning a page over at a lectern is where people lose their place. Slide each finished page quietly to the side instead.

At the lectern

Six things, all small, all learned the hard way by families who have stood there.

Afterward, leave the pages with the family. More than one family has asked for the eulogy later and found that nobody kept a copy. It often ends up read again at the first anniversary, and it belongs with the program in the box of things they keep.

If you are completely stuck

Forget the eulogy for ten minutes and answer these instead, in fragments, on paper. Do not try to write well. You are only collecting material.

Three answers from that list is a eulogy. If you would rather start from a finished piece and change the details, the eulogy examples page has twelve complete ones written for a mother, father, grandparent, spouse, sibling, adult child and friend. If you were asked to say a few words rather than deliver the main eulogy, the funeral speech examples are one to two minutes and written for exactly that.

One last thing about scale. The eulogy is one item on a list that also includes the notice, the program, the flowers and the reception. If the rest of that list is what is actually keeping you up, the funeral planning checklist sorts it into what has to happen today and what can wait, and Reposa will build the program, the obituary sheet and the prayer cards from one set of answers so that the words you have already written only get typed once.