Eulogy Template and Worksheet

What a eulogy is for

A funeral gathers people who are all holding the same weight and are unsure whether to set it down. The eulogy is what gives them permission. When you stand up and say the true things, the funny thing they always said, the way they answered the phone, the room exhales. People cry not because you made them sad but because you made it safe.

You are not writing a biography. The dates and degrees can live in the obituary. Your work is smaller and harder. You are trying to carry one particular person into the room for a few minutes, so vividly that everyone recognizes them and no one wants to look away.

Aim for five to eight minutes spoken, which is roughly 600 to 900 words. Read it aloud with a timer, because eyes read faster than voices do, and a page that looks short can hold a room longer than you think. Shorter and true beats longer and thorough, every time.

Three shapes that hold

You do not need an original structure. You need a sturdy one. Any of these three will carry the weight, and knowing your shape before you write is half the work.

Chronological walks through a life in order, but selectively. Choose four or five moments, not forty, and let each one stand for a season of their life. This shape suits a long life and a speaker who wants a rail to hold onto.

Thematic gathers everything around three memories, or three qualities, each one shown through a story rather than named. She was generous is a claim. She drove the same widowed neighbor to church for eleven years is a person. This shape suits a life too large for order, and it forgives a nervous speaker, because each part stands alone.

The letter is written to them rather than about them. You read it aloud, and the room overhears. It holds the things you never said, and it allows the plainest language of all. Choose it when what you feel is stronger than what you can explain.

The worksheet

Answer these with a pen, quickly and badly. Do not compose. The prompts are designed to go around your sense of what a eulogy should sound like and find what you actually remember. Most people discover the heart of the eulogy in their third or fourth answer, in something they almost did not write down.

Prompts to mine the memories

• What did their hands do? Picture them. What are the hands holding, fixing, stirring, carrying?
• What did they say that everyone still repeats? Write the exact words, in their exact wording.
• How did they answer the phone, enter a room, say goodbye?
• What is one story a stranger should hear to understand them in two minutes?
• What did they love without any self-consciousness at all?
• When were they most fully themselves? Where are they standing in that memory?
• What did they do when things went wrong, for themselves or for you?
• What was their one flaw that everyone forgave, and why did we forgive it?
• What did they make? Meals, gardens, spreadsheets, peace. What exists because they did?
• What did they teach you without ever announcing they were teaching?
• What will you miss on an ordinary Tuesday, not a holiday, a Tuesday?
• If they could hear the eulogy, what line would make them laugh? What line would make them look at their shoes?
• What do you want this room to do differently after today because this person lived?

Delivering it

Print the final version in large type, double spaced, and mark the places to breathe. A slash after every sentence or two is enough. When you reach a slash, stop, breathe in, and let the silence sit. Pauses feel enormous to the speaker and generous to the room. No one has ever complained that a eulogy had too much quiet in it.

Choose a backup reader before the service. Hand them a copy, tell them the signal, a nod or a raised hand, and know that if your voice goes, they will finish it. Most people never need the backup. Nearly everyone speaks better for knowing it is there.

And if you break, break. Stop, hold the podium, breathe, and go on when you can. A cracking voice does not diminish a eulogy. It is the room seeing love with its coat off. Nobody present will remember that you cried. They will remember that you stood up.