Eulogy for a Grandfather, Written Out Five Different Ways

A eulogy for a grandfather usually runs three to five minutes, which is about 500 to 750 words. Build it around two or three specific things he did rather than a summary of his whole life. The objects, the habits and the lines he repeated will carry it. Five complete examples follow, each in a different register.

You are probably speaking about a man whose life mostly happened before you were born. That is the particular problem with a grandfather. You have thirty years of him, maybe fewer, and the first fifty belong to other people in the room.

It is also likely that you are the youngest person who has ever spoken at one of these. Your parents may have asked you because they cannot do it. That is a lot to hold on a Thursday.

So here are five finished eulogies, written out in full. Take one, swap in his name and his details, cut what is not true, and you have a speech. Nobody will know. Everyone who has ever stood up at a funeral started from something.

1. For a grandfather who worked with his hands

Plain and practical. Built around tools, jobs and the things he made. This is the most common shape and the easiest to adapt.

My grandfather fixed things. That is probably the first picture in your head right now, and it is the right place to start.

He was a joiner by trade, forty-one years, and he never really stopped. If something in our house broke, nobody called anyone. We called him. He would arrive on a Saturday morning with a toolbox that smelled of sawdust and oil, and he would look at the broken thing for a long time before he touched it. That was his way. Look first. He said most people break a thing twice, once by accident and once by rushing to mend it.

He built the kitchen table my mum still eats at. He built the shelves in my first flat, and he was annoyed that the walls were not straight, as though the builders had let him down personally. He fitted a gate for the woman at number nine and refused payment for eleven years running.

He was not a talker. You could sit with him for an hour and get four sentences, and all four would be worth having. When I failed my driving test the second time he said, "Well. You will be a better driver than the ones who passed first go." I have no idea if that is true. I have repeated it to myself for twenty years.

He loved my grandmother in the same practical way. He warmed her side of the bed. He scraped her windscreen every winter morning for thirty-two years, and after she died he kept doing the car, even though he had stopped going anywhere much.

In the last year he could not hold a chisel steady. That was harder on him than the diagnosis. So we gave him small jobs. He sanded a shelf for my brother for about four months. It is still in my brother's hall and it is the smoothest piece of wood I have ever touched.

He died on Tuesday morning with the radio on.

I am not going to tell you he is still with us in some way. I do not know about that. What I know is that half the furniture in this room was made by him, and the doors shut properly in four houses in this town because he came round and planed them, and none of that is going anywhere.

Thanks, Grandad. The table is holding up fine.

2. For a grandfather who was funny and stubborn

Laughter at a funeral is allowed and usually welcome. The rule is that the jokes are about him, never at the expense of anyone sitting in the room, and the last thirty seconds turn serious.

I have been asked to keep this short, which is funny, because Grandad never kept anything short in his life.

He had about nine stories. Most of you have heard all nine. Several of you have heard them today, in the car park, from me, because that is how grief works in our family. There was the one about the Ford Cortina. The one about the ferry. The one about the dog and the vicar, which got longer every year and which I have now worked out could not possibly have happened.

He was the most stubborn man I have ever met. He drove a car with a broken radio for six years, because fixing it would have meant admitting the radio was broken. He wore the same brown jacket to every family event from 1998 onwards. When my sister got married he agreed to wear a suit, and he did, and he kept the brown jacket in the boot of the car in case the day turned.

He was also, and I say this with love, a terrible driver. He had one speed and one lane. He once drove my mother and me the whole way to the coast in third gear and told us the car was labouring because of the luggage.

He hated two things above all others: being late, and anybody else being early. He would arrive forty minutes before anything and then complain about how long it took.

He called me "the professor" for twenty-two years because I once used the word "incidentally" at dinner when I was nine.

Here is the thing, though. All nine stories were about other people. He was never the hero of any of them. He was the man in the corner who noticed what happened and remembered it for fifty years, so that he could tell you about yourself at Christmas.

He turned up. That is the unglamorous truth of him. Sports days, hospital waiting rooms, the day my first business folded, two in the morning on the hard shoulder of the motorway. He arrived with a flask and he did not ask a single question.

He would have hated this. He would have said we were making a fuss. He is not here to stop us.

So raise whatever you have got in your hand later on, and when you do, tell one of the nine. Get it wrong. He always did.

Love you, Grandad.

3. The two-minute version

Use this if your voice is not reliable, if there are four other speakers, or if you simply do not have much material. Short is not worse. A short eulogy delivered steadily beats a long one that falls apart at the third paragraph. There are more of these in our collection of short eulogy examples you can read in under three minutes.

My grandfather was called Peter and he was ninety-one when he died.

He was born in this town and he is being buried in it. In between he worked at the quarry, then the post office, then nowhere, happily, for twenty-six years.

He married my grandmother in 1958. They had three children, one of whom is my father, and seven grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren, two of whom are at the back in their school uniforms, because he would have wanted them in school.

Three things about him.

He was early for everything. If you told him eleven, he was there at twenty past ten, sitting in the car, reading the paper, not coming in, because coming in early would have been rude.

He fed every bird in the county. There is a tub of fat balls in his porch that will last until spring and somebody is going to have to deal with that.

He did the crossword in pen. Not because he always got it right. He just did not believe in rubbing things out.

And he was kind in a way that did not announce itself. He never said a word about it. He just quietly worked out who in the family was struggling, and then the money arrived, or the lift was offered, or the phone rang on a Sunday.

He was ill for eight weeks. He was not frightened, or if he was, he did not pass it on to us, which is the most Peter thing I can tell you.

My father was with him at the end, and my aunt, and the nurse he liked, the one from Dundee.

Thank you all for coming. He would be amazed at how many of you there are. He would also be checking his watch.

Goodbye, Grandad.

4. For a grandfather who lived a very long life

When a man reaches his nineties the room is often more relieved than devastated, and the speech can say so. This one does the thing most long-life eulogies avoid: it names what a long life costs the person living it.

My grandfather lived for ninety-six years and I only got the last thirty of them. I want to be honest about that, because most of what I am about to say, I was told.

He was born in 1930. He left school at fourteen. He did his national service and hated it, and he talked about it for the rest of his life, which I think is how you can tell. He met my grandmother at a dance hall that is now a carpet showroom. She was there with someone else that night. He waited.

They were married for sixty-one years. When she died he was eighty-eight, and he did not say very much for about a year. Then he started going to the Tuesday club at the church hall, where he was by some distance the oldest person in the room, and where he became known for being difficult about biscuits.

He kept a diary for seventy-one years. One line a day, no feelings in it anywhere. "Rain. Fixed the gutter. Margaret to her sister's." We have all of them in a box in my father's garage and I have read eleven years of it so far.

A life that long outlives nearly everyone in it. He buried his wife, his brother, both his sisters, his best friend from the quarry, and a son, my uncle Michael, in 2004. I do not know how a person carries that. He did it mostly by getting up, getting dressed properly, and walking to the shop.

The last two years were hard. He did not always know who I was. Some days I was my father. Some days I was a man called Ronnie who I have never been able to identify. I stopped correcting him. We talked about whatever he thought was happening, and some of those were the best conversations we ever had, because he had stopped being careful.

He remembered her, though. Right to the end. He would ask where she was, and I would say she had gone on ahead, and he would nod like that was a perfectly ordinary answer.

I am not sad about a man who got ninety-six years. I am sad for us. There is nobody left now who remembers this family before I existed, and that is the part that has actually landed this week.

Grandad, you were the last of them. Go on ahead.

5. For a grandfather you did not know well

Plenty of grandchildren are asked to speak about a man they saw twice a year. Pretending otherwise is the only real mistake. This one says so in the first line and then goes and finds the material.

I knew my grandfather, but I would not say I knew him well, and I am not going to stand here and pretend otherwise.

He was not an open man. He was born in 1937 into a generation that did not go in for talking about itself, and he kept to that. We saw him at Christmas and in August. He asked how school was. I said fine. That was the shape of it for about fifteen years.

So when my mother asked me to speak today, my first thought was that I was the wrong person. Then I started phoning people, and I found out some things.

I found out that he paid for my aunt's first car and told her it was a raffle prize.

I found out that he worked nights for eleven years so the house would be quiet in the daytime for my grandmother, who had headaches so bad she could not stand the light.

I found out that the man at the garage on Mill Street phoned him every Christmas Eve for thirty years, because my grandfather gave him a job in 1979 when nobody else would, and neither of them ever once mentioned why.

And I found out that he came to my school play in 2004, stood at the back of the hall, and left before the end so that he would not have to talk to anybody.

None of that came from him. He would have been embarrassed by this entire exercise.

I have thought a lot this week about why he was like that, and the honest answer is that I do not know. Some men get no practice at saying things, and then it is late, and then it is too late. That is not an excuse and it is not a complaint. It is just the man.

What I can tell you is that he was reliable in a way that needed no audience. He was there every Christmas. He never let anybody down in any way I have been able to find, and I have asked around.

If you knew him better than I did, come and tell me something later. I am collecting him, a bit at a time, and it turns out there is more of him than I thought.

Goodbye, Grandad. I am sorry we did not get further. You did more than you let on.

How long should a eulogy for a grandfather be?

Three to five minutes, which is 500 to 750 words read aloud at a funeral pace. Aim for the lower end. Grief slows your reading down by roughly ten percent, and most services run four or five minutes behind by the time you stand up.

Count the words in your draft rather than guessing from the page. A typical speaking rate at a funeral is about 130 words a minute, not the 150 you would manage in a meeting. If three grandchildren are speaking, two minutes each is plenty and the funeral director will thank you.

Print it in 16 point or larger, double spaced, on one side of the paper only, and number the pages. Do not use your phone. The screen will dim at the worst moment and your hands will be shaking.

How to find the details when most of his life happened before you were born

Phone three people and ask them one question each. That is the whole method, and it reliably produces more usable material in forty minutes than two days of staring at a blank page.

Ask his surviving siblings or his oldest friend what he was like at twenty. Ask your parent what he was like as a father, which is almost always a different man from the one you knew as a grandfather. Ask whoever handled his affairs what was in the house: the medals, the photographs, the unexplained receipt, the thing he kept for sixty years for no reason anyone can name.

Then look for the repetitions. A eulogy is not a biography and nobody needs the dates in order. What people recognise is the pattern: the thing he always said, the place he always sat, the job he always did without being asked. Two or three of those, told properly, are worth more than a decade of employment history.

If you have the facts in a pile but no shape to put them in, you can put the details into a first draft and then rewrite it in your own words. You see the preview before you pay for anything, and the point is to have something on the page to argue with rather than a blank screen at midnight.

What if several grandchildren are speaking?

Divide it by theme, not by chronology, and tell each other what you are taking. Chronology produces three speeches that all start with where he was born. Themes produce three speeches that sound like three different people loved the same man.

A split that works: one person takes the facts and the family, one takes the funny stories, one takes the last years. Agree who gets the closing line. If you are the youngest and the shortest speaker, go first. The room is kindest in the first two minutes.

Read each other's drafts out loud the night before. You will find the same story in two of them, and it is much better to find it then than at the lectern. Our notes on how to start a eulogy are useful here, because three openings that all begin "On behalf of the family" is the most common version of this problem.

Getting through it on the day

Read it out loud four or five times before the day, and cry during the rehearsals. People who break down at the lectern are almost always reading their own words aloud for the first time. The crying has to happen somewhere, and the kitchen is a better venue than the church.

Mark two places in the margin where you will stop and breathe. Pick them before you are standing up, because you will not be making good decisions at that point. Bring water. Put a hand flat on the lectern. If your voice goes, stop, look at the page, and wait. The room will wait with you for far longer than feels possible, and nobody has ever thought less of anyone for it. There is more on this in our guide to delivering a eulogy without crying.

Have a backup. Give a copy to one person in the front row and tell them that if you stop and look at them, they are to come up and finish it. Naming that person in advance removes most of the fear, and in my experience they almost never have to do it.

Common questions

What is a good eulogy to write for my grandfather?

A good one is specific and short. Pick two or three concrete things, a job he did, an object he kept, a line he always said, and build the speech around those rather than trying to cover ninety years. Three to five minutes is the right length. The examples above are all adaptable: change the names, cut what is not true of him, and keep the shape.

What is a good tribute to a grandfather who died?

The strongest tributes name one habit of his and one thing it did for somebody else. "He scraped her windscreen every morning for thirty-two years" lands harder than "he was a devoted husband", because the first one is a picture and the second is a label. Tell the room something they can see.

What is the best opening line for a eulogy?

Open with a specific sentence about him, not with housekeeping. "My grandfather fixed things" works. "On behalf of the family, I would like to thank you all for coming" does not, because it tells the room nothing and uses up the only moment when everybody is fully listening. Say who you are in the second sentence if you need to.

What is a good farewell message to a grandfather who died?

Keep the last line short, plain and addressed to him rather than to the room. "Thanks, Grandad" or "Goodbye, Grandad, you did more than you let on" are both better endings than a quotation. If you want borrowed words, put them in the middle of the speech and finish in your own. You can see a free preview of a full draft if you want a version of the whole thing to react to.

Is a funny eulogy for a grandfather appropriate?

Yes, if the humour is about him and the ending is serious. Grandfather eulogies carry jokes more easily than most, because the room usually holds several generations and the grandchildren are expected to be warmer and less formal than the children. Keep it to two or three laugh lines, never at the expense of anyone present, and turn serious for the final thirty seconds.

Whichever of these you use, it will be enough. Nobody in that room is assessing your writing. They are there because of him, and they will be grateful that somebody was willing to stand up. If you want examples for a grandmother as well, they are written the same way.

Print it tonight. Read it to the wall twice. Then stop working on it and go to bed.