Writing a eulogy is one of the hardest tasks life can give you. These two examples are not scripts to copy. They show what a speech can look like when it supports the room without smoothing over the truth. Both are deliberately simple.
Example 1: A son speaks for his father
Situation: Funeral service in the chapel. The son speaks after the minister.
My father was not a man of many words. When I was a child and could not sleep at night, he did not say much. He put a chair beside my bed and read the paper until I fell asleep. Sometimes, I think, he sat there for hours.
That is the picture I keep returning to this week: Dad on the chair, the rustle of the newspaper, and the feeling that nothing could happen as long as he was sitting there.
He spent his life fixing things. Cars, taps, bicycles from half the street. As I got older, I understood that this was his language. If you stood in his garage and were allowed to hold a tool, you were being loved, even if the only subject was carburettors.
I will not pretend he was easy. He could stay silent so hard the walls seemed to ring, and his stubbornness was known across the county. Yet when it mattered, and it mattered several times, he was there. Without conditions, without needing to be asked.
Dad, you never liked farewell words, so I will keep this short, the way you would have wanted it: thank you for the chair beside the bed. Thank you for every hour in the garage. We will manage. You taught us how to fix things.
Why this speech works: It begins with one very concrete image, the chair by the bed, and returns to it at the end. It does not idealise: the stubbornness is allowed in, told with warmth, which makes the speech feel true. The final paragraph addresses the person who has died directly. That is the moment people can carry away.
Example 2: A speech for a lifelong friend
Situation: Non-religious funeral service. A friend of forty years speaks.
Some people enter a room and it becomes brighter. Carol entered a room and it became louder. Immediately. Everywhere.
She was my friend for forty years, and in all that time I never once heard her whisper. She laughed so loudly the coffee cups rattled; she sang whenever she felt like it, in the car, in waiting rooms, once memorably in a furniture shop. And she told you the truth whether you wanted to hear it or not. Usually you did not. Usually she was right.
In her final months, when things around her had become quieter, I asked once whether she was afraid. She said, “You know, I lived so loudly that I have nothing to catch up on.”
I want to place that sentence in front of all of us today. Carol did not postpone things. The laughing, the arguing, the making up. Her postcards came from places we had to look up, and her hugs put ribs at risk.
We will never fill the silence she leaves. We can interrupt it now and then: with a song in the car, with a truth that needs saying, with laughter that makes the cups rattle. That would have suited her. Goodbye, Carol. It was loud with you. It was wonderful.
Why this speech works: It chooses one quality, loudness, and tells the whole life through that one motif. The remembered sentence from the person who died is the heart of the speech; lines like that weigh more than anything a speaker can invent. The ending gives mourners something to do, so they are not left with loss alone.
A word on writing your own eulogy
Nobody expects eloquence on a day like this. One true picture, told in simple sentences, comforts more than any ornate phrase. And it is okay to stop, stumble or cry while speaking. Pause, breathe, read on. The room will carry you.