How to write a eulogy: a step-by-step guide with examples for a mum, a dad and a grandparent

A eulogy is a speech in praise of someone who has died, given during the funeral service by a relative, a friend or the celebrant. It is not an obituary: you do not need every date and job. It is a portrait, built from stories, that helps people remember the person as they were.

Several people can share it. In many families one child speaks about the early years and another about the later ones, or a grandchild reads a short piece after the main eulogy.

Funeral Partners, one of the UK's larger funeral groups, suggests that a good eulogy usually lasts three to five minutes and can go up to ten. Read slowly, most people speak 120 to 150 words a minute, so three to five minutes is roughly 400 to 700 words.

Time is often fixed by the venue. As Dignity Funerals points out, some venues allocate a set amount of time for the whole service, and crematorium slots in particular can be tight. Ask the funeral director how long the ceremony slot is and how much of it the eulogy can take before you start writing.

1. Ask the funeral director or celebrant how long you have and where the eulogy sits in the order of service.
2. Gather memories: call siblings, old friends and colleagues; ask each for one story.
3. Choose two or three qualities that defined them (generous, stubborn, funny, brave).
4. Find one short story for each quality. Stories carry more than adjectives.
5. Write the opening and the ending first; they are what people remember.
6. Write it the way you speak, in short sentences, then read it aloud and time it.
7. Send the final wording, and the name of the person speaking, to the celebrant or funeral director in advance.

The three examples below were written for this guide. The names and details are invented; replace every one with your own.

"I'm Sarah, Margaret's eldest. If you knew Mum, you knew that you never left her house hungry and you never left it without a jar of something. Chutney, mostly. Some of you still have jars from 2009.

Mum grew up in Leeds, the youngest of five, and she married Dad at twenty-two in a dress she made herself. She trained as a nurse, and she never really stopped being one: every bruised knee on our street ended up in her kitchen.

She was generous, but she was also fierce. When the school said my brother would never be good at maths, she sat with him every evening for a year. He is an accountant now. She told that story at every opportunity, and she was right to.

What she leaves is all of us, and the habit of setting one more place at the table than we need. Mum, the kettle's on. Thank you for everything."

"Most of you knew Dad as Tony from the allotments, or Tony from the darts team, or Tony who could fix your car if you bought him a pint. To me and my sister he was just Dad, the man who was always in the garage.

He left school at fifteen to work in the shipyard, and he was proud of that all his life. He wasn't a talker. He showed love by doing: driving through the night to collect me when my car broke down in Wales, mending my daughter's bike before she'd finished asking.

He was also the funniest person in any room, as long as the room was small. His jokes were terrible, and he told them anyway.

Dad, the tomatoes are in. We'll try to keep them alive. Thank you for showing us what a good man looks like."

"I'm Jack, one of Grandad's seven grandchildren, and I've been asked to say a few words on behalf of all of us.

Grandad taught every one of us to play cards, and he cheated at every one of those games. He taught us to fish off the pier at Whitby, to say thank you to bus drivers, and to always carry a handkerchief, which none of us do.

He was born in 1938 and lived through more than we can imagine, but what he talked about was Gran: how they met at a dance, how she said no the first time. He kept her photo in his wallet for sixty-one years.

Grandad, we'll keep playing. We might even play fair. Goodbye, and thank you."

• "If you knew [name], you knew that..."
• "I'm [name], and I had the luck of being [name]'s [relationship] for [number] years."
• "There are three things everyone says about [name]..."
• Closing: "[Name], thank you. We'll take it from here."
• Closing: a short poem or a few lines from a song they loved.

• Print it in large type, double-spaced, with page numbers.
• Mark where to pause and breathe.
• Have a glass of water nearby and a second person ready to read it if you cannot carry on. That is completely normal.
• Look up at the start and the end, even if you read the rest.
• If you break down, stop, breathe, and carry on. Nobody minds.

Yes, if they were. Gentle, affectionate humour often brings relief to a room full of grief, and many families say the laughter was what they remembered. Avoid anything that would embarrass someone present, and balance a funny story with a serious one.

A eulogy is a few minutes. Many families want to keep more: the stories that did not fit, the ones told at the wake. A Notre Livre memorial book gathers the memories of the family in a guided conversation and turns them into a biography of 100 to 250 pages, written with AI assistance. Nothing is invented, and you review every chapter before printing.

Prices: £55, £75 or £95 depending on length, with a hardback printed in the UK and the PDF and EPUB included. See the prices page.