Start with the room, not the whole life
You have not been asked to sum up a life. Nobody can do that in four minutes, and the attempt is exactly what makes a eulogy sound like an obituary read slowly. You are answering one question for the people sitting in front of you: what was it like to know this person?
That is a much smaller job, and you already have the answer. It is just not in sentences yet.
So do not open a blank page and try to write a first line. Open the notes app on your phone and make a list instead. Twenty things, no sentences, no order, nothing crossed out. What they always said. Where they sat, and what was within reach of that chair. The argument the two of you always had. What they did when somebody was in trouble. Most of the list will be no use to you. Four or five of the items will make your chest go tight as you type them, and those are your eulogy.
Then talk before you write. Call somebody else who loved them, ask for a story, and tell one back. If you can bear it, record yourself doing it. What you say into the phone is far closer to a good eulogy than anything you will produce at midnight in a formal voice.
Write the opening sentence last. It is the hardest one and the least important.
The questions that actually produce material
Generic questions give you generic answers. Ask yourself what she was like and you will get kind, funny, always there for everybody, which is what people say when they have not yet remembered anything. Ask these instead. Ask three other people who knew them too, and pay attention both to the answers that repeat, which tell you what was true, and to the ones you have never heard before.
- What did they always say? The exact words, in their exact order.
- Where did they sit, and what was within reach of that chair?
- What were they like on an unremarkable Wednesday?
- What did they do that nobody outside the family would know about?
- What did they find funny, and what did they absolutely refuse to find funny?
- What did they teach you without ever intending to teach it?
- What did they do when somebody called them at two in the morning?
- What were they proud of, and what should they have been proud of and never once mentioned?
- What did they carry, in a pocket, in a purse, in the door of the car?
- When did you last see them being completely themselves?
- What did they get wrong, in a way you could say out loud with affection?
- What do you catch yourself doing now that is theirs?
You need about four good answers, not twelve. Using everything you gathered is how a eulogy ends up running fifteen minutes. These are close to the questions we ask families when we write something for them, and the pattern holds every time: the small specific answer beats the large general one.
A shape to hang it on
Chronology is the weakest structure available to you. A life is not a list of dates, the room already knows most of them, and a march from birthplace to retirement leaves everybody waiting politely for the end.
Begin instead by saying who you are and how you knew them. Two sentences will do. Not everybody at a funeral knows everybody else, and hearing "I am the youngest of her three" settles a room that has been standing around in a hallway.
Then put them in one specific place doing one specific thing. A scene, told properly, with the actual kitchen in it and the radio on. This single paragraph does more work than every adjective you could reach for, and it is the part people will repeat to each other in the parking lot.
Then give two or three things they were like, and attach evidence to each one. Do not say she was generous. Say what she did the winter the neighbors' pipes froze. A quality on its own is a claim and the room hears it as one. A quality with a story underneath becomes a memory that other people are allowed to borrow.
Then say what they left behind in the people who are sitting there. Not achievements. The habits, the sayings, the fact that three of her grandchildren cook the way she cooked and cannot explain why.
Then stop on something small. The instinct at the end is to go large, toward love and time and the meaning of a whole life, and it almost never lands. Finish on an object, a sentence of theirs, an instruction. Give the room something it can carry out of the door and use.
How long it should be
Three to five minutes. On the page that is somewhere between 500 and 750 words, which is less than most people expect. If you are one of several speakers, ask whoever is organizing the day how many there are and what they need from you, then keep to it.
Time it out loud, standing up, with a watch running. Reading in your head is about half the true length, and it teaches you nothing about where you will run out of air. Nerves make some people race and grief stops others altogether, so leave a margin either way.
When you are torn, cut. The second-best story is nearly always the one that should go. No one has ever come out of a funeral wishing a eulogy had gone on longer, and a short one does not read as underprepared. It reads as composed.
When the relationship was complicated
A great many people are asked to speak about somebody who was hard to love, or hard to be near, or gone for years at a stretch. You are not under oath and you are not required to lie.
You are also not obliged to settle anything at the microphone. A funeral is not where the argument finally gets won, and it is not where it gets erased either. There is a third way through, and it is the one that works: say the difficult thing once, plainly, without detail, and then go on to what you can say warmly and honestly.
Something like this. "He was not an easy man to be close to. I want to talk about the parts of him I could reach." A single line of that kind buys you the trust of the entire room, because a good half of them are already thinking it and were braced for a performance. Say it without bitterness, give no specifics, and then leave the subject alone. You only need it once.
Be careful to choose truths that are yours to tell. Your experience of him belongs to you. His marriage, his illness, somebody else's version of the same years, those are not yours to make public in front of two hundred people, whatever you privately think.
Then praise what is honestly praiseworthy, even if it turns out to be narrow. He was reliable about one particular thing and never failed at it. She was funny in a way that got people through a bad decade. A small true thing outweighs a large false one, and everybody who knew them can tell the difference the moment it is spoken.
If you cannot find anything you are able to say without anger, you are allowed to decline. Read a short poem instead, or ask that somebody else speak. Saying no is a respectable answer, and people will think better of you for it than for a warm speech nobody in the room believed.
About the crying
Assume it will happen. Very few people get through this dry, and not one person in that room is judging you for it. They are on your side to a degree you will not fully appreciate until you are standing up there.
When it comes, stop. Do not try to push through the middle of a sentence. Look down at the paper instead of at the faces, because the faces are what undo most people, and breathe out slowly rather than in. Keep water within reach and take a drink, which buys you fifteen seconds and gives your hands a job. The pause always feels four times longer to you than it does to anyone listening.
Practice out loud beforehand, four or five times, and especially the sentence that takes you apart. It loses a little of its charge each time. If it is still taking you apart on the fifth reading, it is not going to survive the day. Either cut that sentence or hand it to somebody else to read.
Print the whole thing in sixteen or eighteen point, double spaced, with the lines broken where you would naturally breathe. When your eyes are wet, large type is the only thing that will save you.
Then give a copy to one person in the front row and agree it in advance: if you raise your hand, they come up and finish it. Hardly anybody ever uses this. Knowing it is there is what gets people through.
Reading it on the day
Print two copies on paper, one for you and one for the person in the front row. Phones dim, ring, and go flat, and hunting for a document in front of a silent church is its own small catastrophe. Do not try to memorize it either. Reading is entirely expected at a funeral, and the page is what holds you up when your mind empties.
Say who you are before anything else. Then say their name out loud, and say it more than once. People have come to hear that name said in a room.
Speak more slowly than feels right, and then slow down again. Land on the periods. Look up at the ends of sentences rather than in the middle of them, where you will lose your place. Put the page on the lectern if there is one, or hold it with both hands so the shaking stays your own business.
Do not apologize for being nervous and do not tell the room you are bad at this. It makes everybody anxious on your behalf, and it is not true in any case. You were asked because you are the right person.
Know your last line and stop on it. Say it, pause, and go and sit down. Afterward, leave the pages with the family. They will want them, sometimes years later.
A short eulogy, whole
The one below is invented. It is here for scale and for register more than anything else. Notice how much of it rests on one ordinary detail, how little of it is praise, and how the hard part is handled in two sentences and then let go.
For Ruth, from her son
I am Dan, the middle one. Before anything else: there is food in the hall afterward, and Mom would want me to tell you to take some home. That is done. Now she can relax.
My mother ran the hardware store on Kellner Street for thirty-one years. If you grew up around here there is a decent chance you owe her money, and a better chance she wrote it in the book and never mentioned it again.
She was not warm in the way that word is usually meant. She did not gush. She was suspicious of compliments and openly hostile to fuss. What she did instead was turn up. When my sister’s marriage came apart, Mom drove four hours with a trunk full of groceries, said almost nothing for two days, cleaned the kitchen, and drove home. That was the whole speech. We understood it.
She was also stubborn, and I am not going to stand up here and sand that down. She and I had a stretch of about three years where we mostly discussed the weather. Some of you had your own version of that with her. She was not easy. She was worth it.
Here is the part I want you to take with you. About a year ago I asked her whether she had ever wanted to do something other than the store. She thought about it seriously, because she thought about everything seriously, and she said: I liked knowing what everyone was building.
That is her, exactly. Thirty-one years of people coming in with a problem and a rough measurement, and my mother working out what they were actually trying to make. Not the hinge. The gate. Not the paint. The nursery.
So if she ever sold you a length of chain and asked what it was for, that was not small talk. That was Ruth taking an interest in your life, in the only currency she trusted.
She died on a Tuesday morning with the crossword half finished and, I am told, a strong opinion about seventeen across.
We are going to miss her more than she would have thought reasonable, and she would find this entire event embarrassing, so we will keep it short. Take some food. Tell us a story about her that we have not heard. She liked knowing what everyone was building. Let her know how it turned out.
Look at what that does. He says who he is in the first line. He gives the room one emblem, the store, and keeps coming back to it instead of reaching for new material. The difficult years are named once and then left alone, which is what makes the affection believable. And the last thing said is hers rather than his, which is nearly always the strongest ending available to you.
If you get stuck
Writing about somebody you have just lost is hard in a way that has very little to do with being good at writing. If a paragraph will not sit right, or you have a page of notes and no idea which four things belong in it, send it to [email protected]. A person here will read it and tell you honestly what is already working. There is no charge and there is nothing to buy.
Writing from a family’s own memories is what Known Truly does the rest of the time. Once the service is over and the flowers have gone, some families ask us to make one thing that stays: an original piece written from what they remember, set beside a photograph and framed for the wall. If that is something you want later, it will still be here.