How to Write a Eulogy: A Step-by-Step Guide

How to Write a Eulogy

Write a eulogy in six steps: gather far more material than you need, pick one thing that was consistently true about the person, choose two stories that prove it, draft the whole thing in one sitting without editing, cut it to three to five minutes, and read it out loud before the day. The order matters more than the writing does.

Almost everyone starts at step four. They open a blank document the night before, try to summarise an entire human being, and conclude after two hours that they are not a good enough writer to do this. They are usually a perfectly good writer. What they are short of is material, and material is a thing you collect rather than a thing you think up.

Give the whole job an afternoon if you can — an hour of gathering, twenty minutes of choosing, forty minutes of drafting, and a break before you cut it. The reason to front-load the collecting is that grief is exhausting and concentration comes in short windows. Gathering can be done badly and still work. Drafting cannot.

Gather More Material Than You Need

Open a notes app or take a sheet of paper and write down everything you can think of for twenty minutes without stopping and without judging any of it. Habits, phrases, arguments, the way they answered the phone, what their car smelled like, the thing they always got wrong, the meal they made when someone was ill. Do not try to work out what is useful. At this stage nothing is useful and everything is raw material.

Then call two or three people who knew them from a different angle than you did — a sibling, an old colleague, the friend from before you were born. You are not asking them to help you write. You are asking them for things you could not possibly know.

The questions matter. "What was she like?" produces adjectives, which are useless. These produce material:

• What did she always say? Catchphrases are gold, and everyone remembers a different one.
• What is a time she surprised you? This gets you a story rather than a summary.
• What did she do that drove you mad? Affectionate irritation is where the real person lives, and it is what makes a room laugh.
• What is something she did for you that she never mentioned again? This one produces the passage that makes people cry, almost every time.
• Where do you picture her? A specific room, a chair, a doorway. Images travel; abstractions do not.

Look at the physical evidence too, if you can face it. Photographs, the fridge door, a calendar, the last few texts they sent. You are looking for detail with a texture to it — the specific, slightly odd thing that could not be said about anybody else.

Choose One Through-Line

The default structure is chronological: born here, moved there, married, worked at this place for thirty years, retired, survived by these people. It is the most common shape a eulogy takes and it is the weakest. A chronology asks the room to hold a timeline. It does not ask them to feel anything, and it gives you no way of deciding what to leave out, so it runs long and lands flat.

Instead, read back through your notes and look for the thing that keeps recurring. Not the most impressive thing — the most consistent one. Write it as a single plain sentence, for your eyes only:

That sentence is the through-line. You may never say it out loud in the eulogy — often it is better if you do not — but every part of the speech should be evidence for it. Its real job is editorial: it tells you what to cut. A wonderful story that does not support the through-line goes, however much you like it. Somebody else can tell that one.

If you have three candidate through-lines and cannot choose, pick the one you have the most concrete evidence for rather than the one that sounds most flattering. A well-evidenced small idea beats a grand claim you cannot back up.

A Five-Part Skeleton You Can Fill In

Once you have a through-line and two stories, the structure does itself. Anything in brackets is a detail only you can supply, and those details are the entire point.

Write part five first. It is the shortest part, the hardest to improvise, and the part you will need most if your voice goes at the end. Knowing you have a landing you can reach makes the whole thing easier to start.

Choosing Which Two Stories Survive

You will have more than two. Cutting them is the part people find hardest, so use a test rather than a feeling.

The specificity test: read the sentence and ask whether it could be said about somebody else in the room. "She was generous with her time" could be said about almost anyone. "She drove Mrs. Aldridge to her hospital appointments every Thursday for six years and never once mentioned it to any of us" could only ever be said about her. If a sentence passes for somebody else, cut it or replace it with the detail underneath it.

Three further rules, in order of usefulness:

• Prefer ordinary to dramatic. The dramatic stories are usually already known and often belong to somebody else. The Tuesday-afternoon ones are the ones nobody has heard and the ones that sound like a life.
• Prefer a story where they do something. Action beats description. A story in which the person makes a decision, says something characteristic or shows up somewhere is worth five paragraphs about their qualities.
• Make one story something the room does not know. If you are family, use something from their working life. If you are a friend, use something the family rarely saw. Your job is partly to give the room a piece of the person they did not have.

One honest imperfection is worth including, chosen carefully. A gentle, owned flaw — chronic lateness, an unshakeable opinion, an inability to follow a recipe — makes every warm thing you say afterwards more believable. Avoid anything they were genuinely ashamed of, and avoid anything that touches a family disagreement.

Write the First Draft in One Sitting

Set aside forty minutes and write the whole thing without stopping to fix anything. Do not look up how other people have done it. Do not reread the previous paragraph. If you cannot find a word, put a bracket and keep going. The draft is allowed to be bad, because a bad complete draft can be edited and a beautiful half-draft cannot.

Write it the way you talk. Contractions, short sentences, the word you would actually use. A eulogy is read aloud by a person who is upset, which means long sentences with subordinate clauses become traps. If you would not say it to a friend in a kitchen, do not write it.

Expect to cry while writing it. That is not a sign the material is too much for you; it is generally a sign you have found the right material. The passages that move you at the desk are the passages that will move the room, and having already cried over a sentence at home makes it considerably easier to say in public.

Cut It to Three Minutes

Three to five minutes is the right length — roughly 500 to 700 words read slowly. Leave the draft for an hour, then come back and cut in this order: stacked adjectives first, then the second example of anything you have already demonstrated, then any sentence that summarises what the person meant rather than showing it, then the chronology you did not mean to include. Most first drafts lose a third and improve.

If you find you have cut so much that a section is now thin, that is usually a wording problem rather than a material problem. Our companion piece collects 33 speech passages you can adapt — openings, closings and sections written for a parent, partner, friend or grandparent — which is the fastest way to fill a gap without inventing something you do not mean.

From Notes to Finished Eulogy

Here is the process running end to end. A son, Tom, has been asked to speak about his mother, Eileen. This is what his page looked like after the gathering hour:

Reading it back, the recurring shape is not the swimming or the surgery. It is that she was ahead of everyone — early, prepared, sure of herself, and quietly right. So the through-line, written for himself and never said out loud:

Two stories that prove it: the birthday cards a week early (warm, funny, everyone recognizes it) and the advice at nineteen (different key, shows a side, costs him something to say). Then the finished piece, at just under three minutes:

Note what is not in it. No dates of birth. No job history beyond one line that earns its place. No attempt to say what her life meant. The swimming, the cardigan and the jars did not make it, and the speech is better for their absence — those belong to somebody else's three minutes.

Read It Aloud Before the Day

Reading it in your head does not count, and it is not the same task. Read the whole thing out loud, twice, standing up, at the pace you intend to use. You are doing this for three specific reasons.

• To find the sentence that catches. There is always one, and it is rarely the one you expect. Once you know which it is, you can either rewrite it into something you can say or leave it in and brace for it. Both are fine. Being ambushed by it in front of a hundred people is the thing to avoid.
• To find the sentences you cannot physically say. Anything with three clauses, anything with an awkward run of consonants, anything where you have to remember where the sentence started. Rewrite those into short ones.
• To get the actual timing. Not an estimate from the word count — the real number, from a phone timer, read at grief pace. People routinely find they are two minutes over.

Record the second read-through on your phone and listen back once. It is uncomfortable and it is the single most useful ten minutes in the whole process. You will hear the rushing, and you will hear which lines land.

For the practical side of the day itself — printing, planned pauses, handing a copy to someone in the front row — the speech examples guide has a full section on getting through it, and the celebration of life planning checklist covers everything else that has to be decided.

Five Things That Weaken a Eulogy

• The resume. Dates, job titles, qualifications, the list of who survives them. This is an obituary, it is usually read elsewhere in the service, and it is the fastest way to lose a room.
• Stacked adjectives. "Kind, generous, loving and selfless" is four words that describe nobody. One habit describes everybody's mother differently.
• Speaking to the person rather than the room. A line or two of direct address at the end is moving. A whole eulogy addressed to the deceased leaves everyone else listening in on something private.
• Apologising up front. "I am not good at this, I will probably cry" spends your steadiest thirty seconds lowering expectations the room did not have.
• Trying to speak for everyone. You cannot represent every relationship in the room, and attempting it produces generalities. Speak from exactly where you stood. That is what you were asked for.

One more, which is less a mistake than a shame: assuming that the three or four people speaking are the only ones with something to say. They are simply the ones who were asked.