Writing a eulogy

How long it should be

Three to five minutes, which is about 400 to 700 words. Read aloud, slowly, with pauses, that is longer than it looks on the page. Almost nobody wishes a eulogy had been longer.

If two or three people are each saying something, aim shorter still, two or three minutes each, and agree beforehand who is covering what so the same story is not told twice.

Getting the first sentence down

The blank page is the worst part, and the way through it is not to start at the beginning. Start with one specific thing you remember: a habit, a phrase they always said, the state of their car, what they were like in a queue. Write that down badly. Everything else attaches to it.

A eulogy is not a biography and does not have to run in order. Nobody is checking the dates.

A shape that works

1. Who you are. One line. Half the room may not know.
2. One picture of them, the specific memory you started with, told properly.
3. The facts that matter, briefly: where they were from, the work, the people they made. Not a list of dates.
4. What they were actually like, with a second example rather than adjectives. "He was generous" is worth less than what he did with the ladder.
5. What you will miss, which is the part people remember.
6. A short ending. A line of something they used to say is usually better than anything you can compose.

What to leave out

• The illness, unless it really was them. Most people are not their last six months.
• Old family grievances. A funeral is a bad venue for settling anything, and people remember the attempt for years.
• Anything you cannot say aloud without stopping. Test it. If it takes you apart every time in the kitchen, it will take you apart in the chapel.
• Long lists of names. You will leave somebody out and it will be the thing you think about afterwards. "All the family" is safer and nobody minds.
• Jokes that need explaining. An in-joke lands with four people and puzzles ninety.

Honesty is allowed. If they were difficult, a gentle acknowledgement is usually a relief in the room, because everyone knows. "He was not an easy man, and we loved him" has got more people through a service than any amount of polish.

Reading it on the day

• Ask somebody to be your understudy, with their own copy, sitting near the front. Knowing that somebody can take over is often the thing that lets you finish.
• Mark where to breathe. A slash through the text every few lines is enough.
• If you go, stop and drink some water. Nobody in that room minds waiting. Silence at a funeral is not awkward.
• Read it aloud twice beforehand, once alone and once to somebody. Reading aloud is the only way to find the sentence you cannot get through.

If you cannot do it

Then do not. Write it and ask the celebrant or the minister to read it, which they do often and well, and which is not a failure of any kind. Or ask somebody a little further from the centre of it: a nephew, an old colleague, a friend of forty years. They will usually be honoured to be asked.

Afterwards

Put it on the memorial page. People who were not there will read it, people who were there will want it again, and it is the single thing families are most often asked for in the weeks afterwards. If you are using one of our pages, it goes in the words on the page itself, and it can also be a block in the printed order of service. Building the order of service shows how.