You have read four or five eulogy pages tonight and they all sound like the same person died. Beloved. Devoted. Always there for everyone. The words are not wrong. They are just not about anybody, and the room nods politely at a stranger.
Below are three complete speeches that do the opposite: one for a grandfather, one for a brother, one for a friend. None follows a template. They are built the way real ones are, out of things that only happened once. Read them for the shape, then use the inventory to find yours.
Why They Sound Alike
Almost all of those pages are published by people who sell something at a funeral: gravestones, printed cards, or the service of delivering the speech for you. Ready made sentence blocks are a good way to be found by a grieving family, not a way to help you write something only you could have written.
So the advice converges. Thank the guests, list the life in order, close with a poem about ships and horizons. A structure that cannot fail and cannot land.
You knew them, and the whole job is getting what you already know out of your head and into four minutes.
Our guide to writing and structuring a eulogy lays out the standard order. This page is about what you put inside it.
What Makes It Theirs
One question sorts every sentence you write. Could this be said, unchanged, at somebody else's funeral? If yes, it is filler. "She was kind" would pass at any funeral anywhere. "She kept a spare umbrella in her car for other people" belongs to one woman.
Everything that survives that test has the same four ingredients. A proper noun: a street, a car, a brand of cigarette. A number: forty minutes, three Sundays, 1974. A quotation they said often enough that you can hear the tone. And an object you could put on a table. Abstractions describe a category of person. Objects describe a person.
Notice what is not on that list: chronology. Nobody at a funeral has ever wished the speech covered more decades.
The Ten Minute Inventory
Do this before you write a word. Set a timer for ten minutes and answer with the first thing that arrives. Do not edit: you are mining, not building.
- What did their hands do? Not their job. Their hands. Kneading, rewiring, plaiting hair, drumming on a steering wheel.
- What phrase did they always say? The one the family quotes back to each other, in their word order.
- What did they refuse to throw away? Everyone has one thing, and it is never the valuable one.
- Which argument did they always win? And how: by being right, by outlasting you, or by making you laugh.
- What did they do that drove you mad? You will use one of these, gently. It is usually what you miss first.
- What is the smallest thing you will miss? Small. Smaller than that.
Ten minutes of that produces more material than a week of staring at an opening line. Then pick one answer and let it govern the speech.
One: An Object
For a grandfather, from a grandchild, built from answer three: what they refused to throw away.
My grandad kept a biscuit tin in the shed with the word USEFUL written on the lid in pencil. I opened it on Tuesday. Inside: a fistful of washers, a fuse, a hinge with no door, three keys that do not open anything in this world, a length of green garden string, and one boiled sweet permanently welded to the bottom.
He was born in a year when you did not throw things away, and he never stopped. When I was twelve the strap came off my school bag and my mother said we would get a new one. Grandad said nothing, went out to the shed, and came back eleven minutes later with a buckle he had taken off a dog collar. He fixed it at the kitchen table without looking up, and he said the thing he always said, which was: "Nothing's broken. It's just not fixed yet." I used that bag for four more years.
I know what two of the keys are. One is the back door of a house on Colley Lane that was sold in 1986. One belonged to the shed of a man called Eddie, who he worked beside for thirty years and who died before I was born. He kept other people's keys. Not because he thought the doors were coming back, and not because he was sentimental, which he would have denied under oath. Because somebody had to keep them, and it may as well be him, and there was room in the tin.
The tin was also, and I did not understand this until I was much older, how he handled people. When my uncle Ray needed somewhere to be, in 1998, Grandad drove over, put Ray's bag in the boot, and did not make a speech about it. Ray slept in the back room for two years. Nobody in that house ever used the word forgiveness out loud, because nobody needed to.
We are not sorting the tin. It is going on the shelf exactly as it is. But on your way out, if you knew him and something in you wants to, take one thing from it. There are not enough to go round. That is also true of him. And if this year hands you something with the strap off, or somebody with the strap off, I want you to hear him saying it: nothing's broken. It's just not fixed yet.
Why it works: the tin does all the labour. It is funny in the first thirty seconds and then turns out to be the man's whole character, so the laugh and the point are the same object. The closing instruction gives the room something to do with its hands on the way out.
Two: Their Own Words
For a brother, from a brother, built from answer two. If the person you lost was better with words than you, steal this one.
I am not going to describe Danny. He was better at this than me, so I have brought some of his instead.
Danny lent books and he wrote in them, which is a crime, and he did it in pencil so you could not even be properly angry. I have four of them here. In the margin of one, beside a sentence about how a man becomes the sum of his worst day, he has written: "Not true. Keep going." In another, halfway down a page with nothing else marked on it: "Read this bit again when you are older." I am older. I read it again on Sunday. It is about a man mending a fence.
There is a third note, three words long, next to a description of a man standing in a doorway and not going in. It says: "Go in, coward." I have thought about that one all week. And inside the back cover of that same book there is a list in pencil of everyone he had lent it to. Fourteen names. Nine of you are sitting in this room. There is a tick beside the ones who gave it back and nothing beside the ones who did not, and knowing Danny, that was not a complaint. That was a plan.
His voicemail greeting, which none of us could ever get him to change, said: "It's Danny. I'm probably driving. Say the thing anyway." Twenty years of this family saying the thing anyway into a phone in a car park, and he always rang back, sometimes at half past midnight, starting in the middle of the sentence.
When he moved out he left a list on the fridge for me, because I was seventeen and useless. Five lines, in his handwriting, which I did not think I would see again and then found this week behind a magnet shaped like a pineapple. Four of them are about the immersion heater. The fifth says: "Ring Mum on Sundays, not just when you need something. She knows the difference."
The last message he sent me was about bin day, and it is nine words long, and I have read it more times this week than I am going to admit to. It ends: "I'm fine. Don't overthink it." I am going to overthink it for the rest of my life, and I am going to ring Mum on Sundays.
Why it works: the speaker gets out of the way. The quotations do the portrait, and because they are genuinely his, the room hears the dead man's voice for a minute, and for that minute nobody has to remember what he sounded like.
Three: The One That Laughs
For a friend, from a friend. Built from answer five: what they did that drove you mad.
Priya had no sense of direction. I want to be precise about this, because people say it about themselves and they are being modest. She once drove to the wrong town for my thirtieth and rang me from outside a garden centre to ask why it was so quiet. She had lived in this city for nineteen years and still called the ring road "the one that goes round". She had a satnav. She argued with it, and she won, because she turned where she thought it ought to have told her to turn.
What made it magnificent was the confidence. She was never lost. Everybody else was in the wrong place. She would arrive fifty minutes late, park approximately, come in with two bottles and no apology at all, and within ninety seconds she had made the lateness everyone's favourite part of the evening. I have seen her do this to a wedding.
Every time, once she finally got there, she did the same thing. Not find the host. Not find me. She would go round the room until she found whoever was having the worst time of it, the one standing slightly apart with a drink they had stopped drinking, and she would sit down next to them, sideways, half turned away so it was not an interview, and say something ridiculous. Forty minutes later they would be laughing and she would still be there. She was late to everything in her life and never once late to that.
And then. Three years ago I had the worst night of my adult life, and I did not ring anybody, because that is what I am like. Priya heard at about nine o'clock. She got in the car. She went, and I promise you this is true, entirely the wrong way for the first hour and a half, and she turned around somewhere near a service station she could not name, and she knocked on my door at twenty past two in the morning holding a petrol station sandwich, and she did not say one useful thing, and she stayed until Thursday. She did not book the time off work. She just did not go.
So here is what I know. She could not find a postcode to save her life and she was never once lost about a person. Not ever. She knew who needed her, and she came, badly, immediately, with the wrong sandwich.
Why it works: the joke and the tribute are the same fact. The speech is not funny and then serious, which is the version that jars; the flaw everybody laughed at in the first minute is the proof of her character in the fourth.
When Humour Is Wrong
A laughing speech is the hardest of the three to get right. There are rooms where you do not do this.
- After a sudden death. When the shock is days old, the room has no floor under it. Warmth yes, comedy no.
- After the death of a child. There is no version of this that helps.
- In a divided family. If a dispute runs through the seats, a joke lands as a side being taken.
- Where the community does not do it. Many traditions hold a fixed, formal shape for a funeral speech, and the shape is itself a mark of respect. Breaking it reads as careless, not personal. The answer is a truer sentence inside the form.
Three tests even when the room is right. If the joke needs explaining, cut it. If you are the only one who finds it funny, cut it. If anyone alive is the target, cut it. Then ask the closest mourner whether anything is off limits.
Honest, Not Cruel
A speech that admits nothing is not believed. Everyone there knew the person, difficult parts included, and a portrait with those airbrushed out tells the room the speaker is performing.
The line is easier than it looks. Honest is a difficulty you name and hold: she was stubborn, he could not sit still, she was late to everything including her own wedding. Cruel is a difficulty you explain or justify. Start giving evidence and you have stopped giving a eulogy and started giving a verdict.
Say it in one sentence and move on; the length is the tell. And never introduce a fact the room does not already have. If the person was genuinely hard, aim for accurate: "He was not an easy man, and he would be insulted if I said otherwise."
Letting Others Speak
The easiest way to sound like a person rather than a summary is to stop being the only witness. Message five people with one narrow question. Not "what was she like", which produces adjectives. Ask: tell me one afternoon.
Then weave two replies in as quotations, naming the person as you read, or invite two others to speak for ninety seconds each. Four voices give a fuller portrait than one person carrying a whole life.
If several people are speaking, keep yours shorter: our short eulogy examples are built for the under three minute slot. Whatever length you land on, say it out loud twice before the day, because the sentence that ambushes you is never the one you braced for. Our guide to reading a eulogy without crying has techniques for that.
The Most Personal Version
Notice what all three are doing. A grandchild reassembling a man from a tin of washers. A brother reading his brother's handwriting out of somebody else's book. A friend doing an impression of a voice she will never hear again. Every one is a reconstruction, put together in a hard week by someone who would give anything to just ask.
Which points at the one version that can never sound like a template: the one the person recorded while they were well. Nobody has to guess at the tone or hunt for the phrase they always used, because there it is, with the pause in the middle where it always went.
If these have made you think about your own people, you can record a few minutes in your own voice on Goodbye App, free, on the web and on Android. You write a letter, record audio into it, name who receives it, and set the date it is sent, up to thirty years out. It arrives as an email on the day you chose, and nobody sees it before then. It reaches a person, not a ceremony: nothing about it can be cued or played at a service.
Our piece on recording a message for your own funeral covers how families use one, and writing your own eulogy has three self written examples if you would rather work in text.
Common Questions
Is a non traditional eulogy disrespectful? Not if it is accurate. What is disrespectful is a speech that could have been about anyone. Check that the family and the tradition are comfortable with the form, then be as specific as you like.
How long should these run? Three to four minutes read at a funeral pace, which is slower than you think. Our short eulogy guide has the word counts per minute.
Can I read their texts and messages out loud? As a matter of kindness rather than law, it can be powerful. Leave out anything private and anything about a third person who is sitting there. This is not legal advice, and what you may do with a dead person's private messages differs by country.
What if I am not funny? Then do not be. Only one of the three above sets out to be funny, and what raises a smile in the others is just an accurate detail. Specific beats funny every time.
Can I use one of these speeches? Take the architecture, not the sentences. An object, a handful of quotations, a flaw that turns: those are free. The biscuit tin, the pencil in the margins and the wrong road all belong to people who never lived. Borrow the joinery, not the nails.
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