Write a eulogy for someone you love.
You’ve been asked to say the unsayable, probably on three days’ notice. This will help: a few gentle questions, a clear structure, and — if you want it — a full, speakable draft. Free, from someone who has stood where you’re standing.
How to write a eulogy, in plain terms
A eulogy is not a biography and not a performance. It is five minutes of borrowed attention in which you hand the room one true piece of a person, so that everyone leaves carrying it. Everything below follows from that.
Start with the relationship, not the résumé. “Anna was my mother” does more work than a list of jobs and cities ever will. The room doesn’t need the facts of the life — most of them lived it alongside her. They need to hear what it was like to be loved by her, from where you stood.
Build it on one to three specific stories. The single most common mistake is generality — she was kind, she was generous, she loved her family. True, and forgettable. The version people carry out of the room is the Tuesday she drove forty minutes to bring you a ladder you never asked for. Specific beats grand, every time. If a detail makes you smile or sting when you write it, it belongs in.
Say what they leave behind. After the stories, turn once toward the room: what did this person teach the people around them, usually without saying it out loud? How will you carry it? One habit, one phrase, one way of treating people is enough.
End simply. A eulogy doesn’t need a closing flourish. “Thank you” or “goodbye,” said plainly, lands harder than anything ornate. If it feels right, speak the last sentence or two directly to them.
On delivery: print it in large type, double-spaced. Read it aloud once beforehand — your ear catches what your eye won’t. Ask someone to hold a copy as your backup reader. And know that crying at your own mother’s eulogy is not a failure of composure; it is the room seeing what she meant. Pause, breathe, continue.
The guided writer above will walk you through all of this — and whether or not you use it, the structure is yours to keep: relationship, stories, what remains, goodbye.
What families ask
How long should a eulogy be?
Two to six minutes spoken — roughly 260 to 780 words. Shorter than you fear is almost always better than longer than the room can hold. Nobody has ever left a service saying the eulogy should have gone on more.
Can a eulogy be funny?
Yes — if they were. A story that makes the room laugh is often the moment everyone remembers, because for a few seconds the person is back. Let the laughter come from who they were, never from performing for the room.
What if I cry while delivering it?
Then you cry. Pause, breathe, and keep going — no one is timing you, and no one in that room will think less of you. Print the eulogy in large type, and ask someone beforehand to be your backup reader just in case.
What should a eulogy include?
Who they were to you, one to three specific stories, what they taught the people around them, and a simple goodbye. Specific beats grand: the trip to the hardware store outlives the résumé.
From someone who has stood there
In 2019, my own brother died. I threw myself into painting every day for a year — 365 paintings that became the documentary The Art of Grieving. This tool exists because the days right after a loss are the hardest place to find words, and no one should face a blank page alone there.
If, when the service is behind you, you find you want those memories held in something lasting — that is the work I do: original memorial paintings built from exactly the kind of moments you gathered here.