If you have been asked to give a eulogy for a brother or sister, start with the simple five-part template on this page, then borrow from the six complete speeches built on it. You do not need a blank page. You need the back seat of the car: who got the window, who started it, the games you played to get through the long drives. Very few people at the funeral were in that car, and if your parents are still alive, you may be keeping an eye on them while you speak.
Below are six complete funeral speeches, each followed by a short note on why it works. A younger sister speaks for her older brother after a long illness. An older brother speaks for his younger sister after a sudden death. A woman in her late seventies speaks for the sister she shared a whole life with. A brother speaks after years of addiction. A sister speaks for a brother she had grown apart from. And one sibling speaks because their parents cannot. All six are built from the same five parts, so you can build your own.
What Only a Brother or Sister Can Say
For most people, a brother or sister is the longest relationship of their life. For the younger of you, it began before your first memory, and it is supposed to go on long after your parents have gone. That is a great deal to carry into a few minutes, and four things make this speech different from any other eulogy.
You hold the childhood. Your brother or sister was one of the very few people who lived inside your childhood: the same house, the same rules, the same kitchen table. Now some of it is remembered by you alone. Few people at the funeral can tell those stories.
Your parents may be in the front row. If they are alive, they are burying their child, and every sentence you say reaches them first. A story about a teenage night out that gets a laugh among friends can sound very different in front of your mother. Read each line and ask whether you could say it to her face.
The rivalry is part of the truth. Most of the room knows you fought, or can guess: over the bathroom, the television, whose turn it was. Leave all of that out and the rest of the speech becomes harder to believe. Tell one fight, kindly, and if you can, choose one you lost.
You are grieving while looking after everyone else. Brothers and sisters are often the ones making the phone calls, sitting with the parents, choosing the music and answering the door. Your own grief gets whatever is left of the night. That is normal, and it is one reason this speech is so hard to start. You do not have to be the steadiest person in the family and its best writer in the same week.
A Simple Eulogy Template for a Brother or Sister
Neil, Kate, Peggy, Sean, Andrew and Michael, and the brothers and sisters who speak for them, never lived. Their speeches were written for this page to show the template working, so borrow the order, not the hill or the gravy.
A eulogy for a brother or sister can follow a simple five-part template, and all six below are built on it. You can fill it in tonight:
- An opening. One place or moment the two of you shared or, if there is a hard fact, that fact said plainly.
- The shared childhood. One or two stories from before either of you grew up.
- Who they became. The adult, in one or two concrete examples.
- The thing only you knew. Something the room has never heard, or never put together.
- A last line. One thing for the room to do, one thing you will now do yourself, or a plain thank you.
Here is how the first speech fills it in:
- The opening is the hill behind the garages.
- The shared childhood is the races to the postbox.
- Who he became is the maths teacher at Hillside.
- The thing only she knew is the notebook.
- The last line asks the room to walk beside someone.
Choose by who is speaking for whom, and why, then by length. Each speech also works the other way round with the names changed: the illness speech for a sister after cancer, the sudden-death speech for a brother. Read at a slow, steady pace, about 130 words a minute, so each speech below runs three to four minutes. At a Catholic funeral Mass, words of remembrance usually come near the end and need the priest's permission, and some parishes limit length or ask to see the text. Ask the parish early; the vigil or the reception can take a longer speech.
For the whole method from a blank page, see our guide to writing a eulogy step by step. If you are writing for a parent, there are separate pages of eulogies for a mother and eulogy examples for a father.
For an Older Brother Who Had Cancer, From His Younger Sister
About 460 words, three and a half minutes at a slow pace.
My brother Neil taught me to ride a bike on the hill behind the garages on Elm Road, the summer I was six and he was eleven. He ran behind me holding the back of the saddle, shouting, "I've got you, I've got you," all the way down. At the bottom I grabbed the lamp post and turned round to thank him, and he was still at the top, with his hands in his pockets. He had let go at the first drain cover.
I did not speak to him until dinner. He said, "You didn't need me holding on. You needed to think I was." I told Mum. Mum said that was a very wise thing to say, and he was unbearable about it for a week.
That was Neil. Half wisdom, half showing off, and you never knew which half you were getting.
He called me Lamp Post from that summer on. He called me Lamp Post at my graduation. He called me Lamp Post in his speech at my wedding, in front of a hundred and twenty guests. We raced from the front gate to the postbox every day for years, and he kept score in a notebook, and when I started winning, at about twelve, the notebook disappeared. He gave it back to me in the hospital in May. He had kept it going every time I came home. I am ahead by forty-two races, and next to every one of my wins he has written the same word: downhill.
He became exactly the man you would expect from that boy. He taught maths at Hillside for twenty-six years. He made fractions funny, and he knew the name of every child who ever sat at the back of his classroom, because he had sat at the back of every classroom himself.
He had cancer for the last three years. He marked homework in waiting rooms. He gave every nurse a nickname. He called me Lamp Post on the last afternoon, very quietly, because he had a reputation to keep up.
In the last few months I was the one walking beside him. Down the corridor, up the three steps to his front door, along the sea wall in August to see the water. I held his arm and said, "I've got you." And every time, he said, "Liar." And we both laughed, because this time we both knew I was not letting go.
If you want to do one thing for Neil, find somebody who is losing their balance. Your son, your neighbour, the new teacher at Hillside. Walk beside them. Tell them you have got them. And then, unlike my brother, actually hold on.
Neil, forty-two races. Not all of them downhill.
One afternoon on a hill carries the whole speech, and it keeps coming back: the nickname, the notebook, the words "I've got you" turned round at the end. The illness gets one plain sentence and then the man himself, which tells the room it can relax. And the teasing is returned, gently, in the last line.
For a Younger Sister Who Died Suddenly, From Her Big Brother
About 440 words, three and a half minutes. It names no cause, so it can be used whatever happened.
I am Kate's big brother. I am four years older than her, and for thirty-four years I believed my job in this family was to stand between my little sister and anything that could hurt her. I was supposed to stand up here a very long time from now, for somebody old. The order is wrong.
I took the job seriously from the start. I walked her to school every morning for six years on the outside of the pavement, nearest the traffic, because Dad said that was where a gentleman walks, and I was nine and wanted to be one. I stood between her and the Hendersons' dog, which was small and old and had never bitten anyone, though neither of us knew that. When she was fifteen I sat on the stairs in the dark until I heard her first boyfriend bring her to the gate.
She never needed any of it. She grew into the most capable person I know. She was running her own veterinary practice at thirty-one. Half this town has handed her a frightened cat in a cardboard box, and the girl who once hid behind me from the Hendersons' dog could calm a sixty-kilo one by raising an eyebrow.
Since Tuesday, people have been telling me things I did not know, and it has changed how I see the last eight years.
Her friend Amira told me that when I lost my job eight years ago, Kate rang Mum and Dad every Sunday night to tell them I was doing fine, so they would not worry. Then she rang me every Monday night to make sure I was. I thought those Monday calls were my little sister needing her big brother. They were not.
And Amira told me something else, laughing, at the back of the kitchen. Whenever Kate and I walked anywhere together as adults, Kate quietly moved me to the inside of the pavement. Every time. I never noticed. For years, my little sister had been walking on the outside for me.
Mum, Dad: she said more than once that the best of her came from the two of you. She was right, and I wanted you to hear it from me today.
So at thirty-eight I have learned that I was the one being looked after. I suspect some of you have a person like that, and have not noticed either. Do not wait to find out the way I did. Find out who has been walking on the outside for you, and thank them while they can hear it.
Kate, I will walk on the outside now. For all of them.
This speech deliberately never explains the death. It gives no cause, asks nothing about it and makes no attempt to account for it, so the same words work whatever happened, and nobody in the room is asked to think about one day instead of thirty-four years. The protector learning he was protected turns the wrong order into something the room can carry home. The line to the parents is short on purpose: it gives them something to keep without making them the subject.
For a Sister, From a Sister, After a Long Life Together
About 490 words, three and a half to four minutes, from a woman of seventy-eight for her older sister.
My sister Peggy was three years older than me, and she never once let me forget it. Not when I was seven, and not last month, when I was seventy-eight and she was eighty-one and she introduced me to a nurse as "the baby."
We were opposites from the start. Peggy was tidy and I was not. Peggy could sing, and in 1957 the choir mistress asked me, very kindly, to move my lips and make no sound. Peggy lived her whole life in this town, in the same street, with the same butcher. I went to London at nineteen and came back at sixty, and she met me at the station and said, "Well, that took you long enough." She married a quiet man and I married a loud one, and each of us thought the other had made a terrible mistake, and we were both wrong.
And she was my best friend for seventy-eight years. People think sisters our age stay close because we have to. We stayed close because she was the most interesting person I knew. Ever since I came home, once we were both on our own, we walked the river path to the bridge and back most weeks, and argued the whole way, and had a pot of tea at the café that closes too early, and argued about that.
Here is what I keep coming back to. Peggy was the only other person alive who remembered our parents' house. Number 31, Quarry Lane. It was knocked down in 1974, and almost nobody here today ever went inside it. The front door stuck in wet weather, so you had to lift it and push. Mother kept the rent money in a tea caddy with a ship on the lid. Father's chair was by the window, and nobody was allowed to sit in it. Peggy sat in it every single time he went out, and was caught every single time, because she never remembered to put the cushion back.
Two weeks ago, in the hospice, she woke up and asked me what colour the kitchen was. I said green. She said, "It was blue. You never notice anything." And we argued about it for twenty minutes, happily, in low voices, two old women arguing about a kitchen that has not existed for fifty years. We were the last two people on earth who could have had that argument.
Now there is one. I have been thinking about what it means to be the one left to remember, and I think it means you become the house. People will bring me the questions only Peggy and I could answer, and I will answer them alone, and some days I will get them wrong. So this winter I am writing it all down: the door, the caddy, the chair, the cushion. And I will tell anyone who asks.
The kitchen was green, Peggy. I am sorry, darling. It was green.
Opposites are the easiest way into a speech between sisters, because everyone in the room has watched the two of you disagree for decades. The house does the rest. At this age a sibling is often the only one left who remembers a whole household, and three small objects from it take the room somewhere it has never been. Ending on the old argument keeps her sister's voice in the room one last time.
For a Brother, After Years of Addiction
About 470 words, three and a half minutes. It names no substance and says nothing about how he died.
My brother Sean lived with addiction for most of his adult life. Everyone here knows that, so I will get it said at the start and then leave it. It was part of his life. It was not who he was, and it is not what I am here to talk about.
First, something for my family, and for the friends who were there. It was hard. There were phone calls in the middle of the night. There were years when we did not know which city he was in. Mum kept his bed made through all of them. Loving Sean asked a great deal of every one of you, and you kept doing it, for twenty years. Nobody gives out prizes for that, so I am saying it out loud. You did it. He knew you did.
Now, my brother. Sean could cook. Not well. Brilliantly. He could walk into your house, open every cupboard, and out of half an onion, a tin of tomatoes and some rice make a dinner better than anything you had planned. He learned at our grandmother's stove, and he never used a recipe in his life.
When we were boys, he made our tea on the nights Mum worked late. Fried eggs, every night for a year, because at eleven eggs were all he could do. He served mine on a plate with a folded piece of kitchen paper beside it, like a waiter, and called me sir. I was seven. I have never been treated so well in a restaurant since.
For twenty Christmases he made the gravy. Some years he arrived at noon, some years at four. One or two years he did not arrive at all, and we said the gravy from the packet was fine, and nobody believed it. When he did walk in, the whole house changed. He took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves and said, "Right. Who has been ruining this?"
For his last four years he cooked breakfast at the community hall on Albert Street, for whoever came in. Some of the people he fed are here today. One of you told me at the door this morning that Sean was the first person in a long time to look you in the eye and ask how you liked your eggs. That is exactly my brother.
I am not going to tell you his life was a tragedy, and I am not going to tell you it had a neat ending. It was his life. It was hard, and it was full of people he fed.
This Christmas somebody in this family will have to make the gravy. It is going to be me, and it is going to be wrong, and somebody will lean over the pan and say, "Right. Who has been ruining this?" And for a second it will be him.
Three choices hold the hard truth with dignity. Name it once, early, in words that put the person first: he lived with addiction. Give the family's exhaustion one paragraph of its own, so the people who carried the most hear it acknowledged without anyone being judged. Then spend everything else on the man: his hands, his kitchen, the people he fed. The hard years are in the speech too, inside the gravy, without one word of blame.
When You Had Grown Apart
About 400 words, three minutes, from a sister for a brother she had hardly spoken to in years.
I had not had a real conversation with my brother Andrew for eleven years. There was no great argument. There was a wedding one of us missed, and a move to another city, and then a long quiet that neither of us knew how to end. That is all of it, and it is the last time I will mention it.
What I have instead is the boy. It turns out that is a great deal.
Andrew was two years older than me. When I was five, he built a den at the bottom of our grandparents' garden out of an old door, two wooden pallets and a green tablecloth. He made a rule that no girls were allowed in. Then he made a second rule, that I did not count as a girl, because I was the guard. I was the guard for six summers. My duties were watching for Grandad and being in charge of the biscuits.
When I had chickenpox at eight, Mum would not let him into my room, so he sat outside the door and read me the whole of Treasure Island, every voice, including the parrot. It took him nine days. He never told his friends.
When I was ten I broke Grandad's greenhouse with a football, and Andrew told him it was his kick. He lost his pocket money for a month, and he never once used it against me, not even in a fight.
I do not know the man he became as well as many of you do, and I have been listening. One of his teammates told me that for thirty years Andrew was the one who stayed behind after every match to stack the chairs and lock up, so everyone else could get home.
I recognized that story at once. It is the boy outside my bedroom door, grown up.
In our house there was a rule about fights. Whoever held out their little finger first was the one saying sorry, and the other one had to take it. That was the law. Andrew held his out first every time. Every time, for fifteen years, even when it was my fault, which it usually was. I never once went first.
So, Andrew. Here is my little finger. I am going first.
The distance takes three sentences at the very start and blames nobody, and after that the speech belongs to the boy, which frees the room to listen. When the adult years are thin, childhood is where the evidence lives, and the one story from his teammate is used only to prove the boy and the man were the same person. The ending is one small act the speaker can still do herself: going first.
When You Are Speaking Because Your Parents Cannot
About 390 words, three minutes, from an older sister for her brother, on behalf of their parents.
My name is Clare, and Michael was my little brother. I am speaking this morning for my parents, who are sitting here in the front row. They asked me to do it because standing up today is more than anybody should ask of them. So for the next few minutes I am their voice, and only now and then my own.
Before anything else: Helen, Sophie, Jack. He was yours first. Nothing I say today is meant to take any of him away from you.
Dad has told the same story for as long as I can remember, and he would want it told today. Michael was the only one of his children who ever won an argument with him, and he was nine. It was about whether a bat is a bird. Dad would like it known that it never happened again. Michael claimed it did, every Christmas, for thirty-nine years.
Mum always says he was the easiest baby she had, and the kindest man she knows.
What I can add is what Michael was to them in the last ten years, because I watched it. He lived ten minutes away, and he made sure they never had to ask for anything. He cut their hedge on the first Saturday of every month. He knew which biscuits Mum likes and which shelf she keeps them on, and he did their shopping on his way home without a list. When the snow came in February, he was at their door at seven in the morning with a shovel, before either of them had opened the curtains. And every Sunday he stayed for a cup of tea he did not want, because Dad wanted to tell him about the news, and Michael let him, start to finish.
When we were small, he followed me everywhere, and I complained about it constantly. He followed me to the bus stop, to my friends' houses, and once all the way to the dentist, where he sat in the waiting room for an hour so that he could walk me home. I would give a great deal to be followed now.
Mum, Dad, everyone in this room came because of the man you raised. You did that.
On their behalf, and on mine: thank you for coming for him, and for the cards, the casseroles and the phone calls this month.
If you have been asked to do this, a few things matter more than the writing. If your brother or sister had a spouse or partner, or children, they usually come first in the funeral decisions, so check the stories with them before you tell them, and say their names early, as Clare does. Ask your parents what they most want the room to know, and what must not be said. Parents often know which story would hurt someone in the room. On the day, stand where they can see your face.
What Two Famous Sibling Eulogies Got Right
Two famous sibling eulogies show what only a brother or sister can do at a funeral.
Charles Spencer, the 9th Earl Spencer, gave the eulogy for his sister Diana at her funeral in Westminster Abbey on 6 September 1997, six days after she died in a car crash in Paris. He was her younger brother; they were the two youngest children in the family. Alongside the public woman, he claimed the private one: the big sister of his childhood, the weekend train journeys between their parents' homes, the last time he saw her, on her birthday in London. He remembered "the big sister who mothered me as a baby." He also warned against turning her into a saint.
Spencer has said his first draft was a conventional list of what his sister had been good at as a child. He put it aside, decided his job was to speak for her, and wrote the speech he gave in about an hour and a half. In September 2026 he published a memoir of her, titled Swan Song: Diana, My Sister.
Steve Jobs died on 5 October 2011. On 16 October, the novelist Mona Simpson gave the eulogy for her brother at his memorial service at Stanford University's Memorial Church. She grew up as an only child and did not meet her brother until she was 25, so she had no shared childhood to draw on. Instead of praising his genius, she described him after his liver transplant, pushing a chair down a hospital corridor, counting his steps and going a little farther each day. The New York Times published the text on 30 October 2011 as "A Sister's Eulogy for Steve Jobs."
A sibling can claim the private person the rest of the room never met, and a first draft that lists achievements can be put aside. One small, exact detail, such as a chair in a corridor, outweighs any amount of praise. And if you met your brother or sister late in life, or lost touch for years, Simpson's speech shows that you still have enough to say.
Finding Your Own Sibling Stories
Start with the material only a brother or sister has. Answer these before you choose a speech.
- Where did you sleep, and where did you sit? The shared bedroom, the bunk beds, the long drives. Many sibling stories start in one of those places.
- Which argument became a family joke? The one your parents still tell, and any nickname that came out of it. It often makes the best opening, because the room already knows how it ends.
- What did the two of you know about your parents that nobody else did? How your father sang in the car, what your mother said when she was cross. This is the material only the two of you held, and it belongs in the speech.
- Who got blamed for what the other one did? The broken window, the missing biscuits. Siblings keep these accounts for life, and the room will enjoy an old debt settled in public.
- What would they hate you to tell? Then decide honestly whether it is affectionate enough to tell anyway. If it would embarrass them in front of their own children, leave it out.
Two more steps, both particular to siblings. If you have other brothers or sisters, agree the stories with them before the day. Each of you grew up in a slightly different family, and the funeral is the wrong place to find that out. Then decide which of you will sit beside your parents while you speak, so you are not watching them alone from the front.
Saying It While They Can Hear It
Kate's brother heard about the Monday phone calls from her friend, in a kitchen, after she had died. If you have a brother or sister who is still living, they can hear what you think of them from you. You do not need an occasion. Tell them one story from your childhood now, while they can argue with your version. It can feel strange to say these things to a brother or sister without a reason. Say them anyway. A few honest lines about one summer you both remember are enough. They will keep it.
On Goodbye App you can write a letter to a brother or sister who is still here, add one recording of your voice, and pick the day and the hour it goes out by email: later today, on their birthday, or up to thirty years from now. It stays private until it is sent, and it is free on the web and on Android. If you have never recorded your voice before, our guide to recording your voice for your family covers the simple steps.
If you are giving a eulogy yourself, you can also record yourself reading it beforehand, so the person standing by to read it for you can hear your pace.
Common Questions
How long should a eulogy for a brother or sister be? If your parents or other brothers and sisters are speaking too, keep yours to two or three minutes. If yours is the main tribute, three to five minutes, about 390 to 650 words read slowly. The six speeches above run three to four minutes; for one-minute versions and the arithmetic behind them, see our short eulogy examples.
Do I have to say how my brother died? No. You do not have to say how your brother died. If the family agrees to name the cause, say it once, plainly, and without detail, then return to his life. The second speech above shows a sudden death spoken about without any explanation at all.
What do I say if we were estranged? One honest sentence near the start, with no blame, and then the childhood you did share. Do not explain the distance, defend yourself or hint at whose fault it was. The people who need to know already do. The fifth speech is built for exactly this.
My parents cannot speak. How do I speak for them? Ask them what they most want the room to know and what must not be said, and stand where they can see you. Check the stories first with your brother's or sister's partner and children. The sixth speech shows the shape.
Can I use these for a brother-in-law or sister-in-law? Yes. Say in one sentence how they came into the family, borrow the listening paragraph from the fifth speech, where a friend fills in the adult years, and give the last line to your own brother or sister, who has lost a partner.
Is it all right to be funny at my sister's funeral? Yes, if she was funny, or if the two of you were. Teasing is one of the truest things a sibling can bring into the room, as long as she would have laughed too and nobody alive is the target. Our unconventional eulogy examples include a speech built to make people laugh, and the times when humour is wrong.
What if my voice goes halfway through? Then someone else finishes it, and that is fine. Agree a stand-in and a signal before the service, often another brother or sister, as our guide to reading a eulogy without crying explains.
Every person has a legacy®
Begin
