Eulogy for a Husband: Five Examples, One Very Short

A eulogy for a husband usually runs three to five minutes, about 500 to 750 words, built around two or three memories rather than a full life story. Six sentences is also a real eulogy. Below are five complete examples: a long marriage, a funny one, a very short one, one after a long illness, and one from a daughter.

You are probably not reading this because you want to write. Someone has put a date on a funeral, your name is next to a word you did not choose, and the man you are supposed to describe is the one person you never had to explain to anybody.

That is the particular difficulty here. For a parent or a grandparent you can tell the story from the outside. For a husband you were inside it. Forty years of shorthand and in-jokes and ordinary Tuesdays do not come apart into paragraphs, and when you try, what you write sounds either too small or like somebody else's wedding speech.

So do not try to sum him up. Pick two or three things that were true every single day and let those stand for the rest. None of the examples below runs longer than five minutes.

Five eulogies for a husband, written out in full

Each one is complete and meant to be read aloud. The names and details are invented, so you will need to swap yours in, but the shape underneath each is the part worth keeping. They are in five different voices on purpose: pick the one that sounds closest to how you actually talk.

1. For a long marriage, told plainly

Forty one years, no jokes, no big finish. One daily habit carries the whole speech.

My name is Ruth. Tom and I were married for forty one years, which means most of you have only ever known us as a pair.

I want to tell you about his mornings, because that is where I will miss him most.

He was awake at ten past five every day of his working life and he never once used an alarm. He made tea in the same brown pot. He stood at the kitchen window while it brewed and looked out at the garden, and if you asked him what he was thinking he would say "nothing much" and he meant it. Then he brought a cup upstairs to me. Forty one years of tea I did not have to make.

He was a quantity surveyor for thirty four years and he was very good at it, and I am not going to pretend that is the interesting part of him.

The interesting part was that he noticed things. He noticed when our neighbour Pat stopped putting her bins out, and he went round. He noticed when our daughter went quiet on the phone, which I never did, and he would ring her back an hour later about nothing at all so she had the chance to say it. He noticed when I had had a bad day before I had said a word about it.

He was not a talker. People sometimes read that as cold and it was the opposite of cold. He turned up. When Michael's car died in Carlisle at eleven at night, Tom drove four hours there and four hours back and complained about none of it. When my mother was dying he sat with her so that I could sleep. He did the things that are boring and heavy, without being asked and without wanting any credit, and I have come to think that is the rarest thing a person can be.

These last few weeks he was tired, and he knew what was coming, and he was not frightened. He wanted to know the garden would be looked after. He wanted to know I would eat properly. He said sorry for the fuss. I told him there was no fuss. There was an enormous amount of fuss and he was worth every minute of it.

I have been married to him since I was twenty two. I do not know how to be anything else yet. I expect I will learn, and I expect it will take a while, and I know exactly what he would say about me standing up here making a speech about tea.

Tom, I made my own this morning. It was fine. It was not the same.

Thank you all for coming. He would have hated the attention, and he would have come anyway, because that is what he did.

2. For a husband who made everybody laugh

The funny one. It earns the right to be funny by landing somewhere serious in the middle.

Dave would want me to start by telling you that he once set fire to a barbecue, a fence, and a small section of his own eyebrow, in that order, at my sister's engagement party.

He was not a careful man. He was a wonderful man. Those are different things.

We were married thirty two years. In that time he reversed into the same gatepost on four separate occasions, and each time he got out and inspected the gatepost as though the gatepost had moved. He could not sing and he sang constantly. He had opinions about motorway service stations. Strong ones. Ranked.

He gave terrible presents with enormous confidence. One year he bought me a bread maker, because he wanted a bread maker. Another year, a fishing rod. I have never fished. He said "you might".

He was banned from the quiz at the Crown for arguing with the question master about whether Jupiter counts. I still do not know what that means and now I never will.

And he was the first person anyone rang when something went wrong. That is the bit I want you to hold on to.

When Steve was made redundant, Dave turned up at his house with a six pack and a ladder, because Steve had mentioned a gutter eight months earlier. When our Katie was at her lowest, he drove her to work every morning for a year and pretended it was on his way. It was not on his way. It was forty minutes out of his way, both ends.

He made people feel like the funniest version of themselves. You would say something half decent and he would laugh as though you had done something remarkable, and you would come away thinking you were quite good company. That is a real gift and he gave it away constantly, to anyone, in queues, at bus stops, to the man who came to read the meter.

Three weeks ago he told me he wanted "something upbeat" today, and then listed four songs, all of which are about lorries.

Dave, I have done one of them. You will have to live with the rest of it.

I am going to miss being laughed at. I am going to miss the noise. I am going to miss coming downstairs to find out what he has done now.

Thank you for being here. Have a drink, and then come and tell me something he did that I do not know about, because I have a horrible feeling there is a great deal of it.

3. The very short one, six sentences

For when you can barely stand up, let alone speak for five minutes. This is a finished eulogy. It is allowed to be this short.

My name is Anna, and Peter was my husband for nineteen years. He was kind in the ordinary daily way that nobody writes songs about, he was a very good father, and he laughed at his own jokes before he got to the end of them. I had a longer speech written and I find I cannot read it, so this is the short one. What I want you to know is that he was happy, right up until the week before, and that he knew exactly how much he was loved. If he mattered to you, thank you for being here, because he would have counted every single one of you. Please come and tell me your stories about him another day, when I can hear them properly.

4. For a husband who was ill for a long time

Where the last two years took up most of the room. This one names the illness early, then deliberately refuses to let it be the main event.

Jim was ill for two years and four months, and I want to say something about that before I say anything else, because it took up a great deal of our ending and I am not going to skip past it.

It was hard. It was not only hard. There were afternoons in that front room, with the telly on low and the curtains half shut, that were some of the closest we ever were in thirty eight years. Nobody warns you about that part.

He was diagnosed in the March. He was furious for about a fortnight, which in Jim's case meant he tidied the shed, and then he sat me down at the kitchen table and said right, what do we need to sort out. That was him. Get the list made.

So we made the list. He wrote his own words for today, then crossed most of it out, then told me to say whatever I liked. He chose the hymns. He rang his brother in Canada, which the two of them had been putting off for eleven years, and they talked for two hours, and he came off the phone and said "well, that was overdue".

What I want you to know is that the illness was not the main event. Jim laid bricks for forty years and he was proud of it, and there are walls in this town he would point at from the car. He taught both our boys to drive and survived it. He supported a football team that never once rewarded him for it. He cut my father's hedge every September for twenty six years and never had to be asked twice.

He was a tough man about everything except us. He cried at both the boys' weddings. He cried at an advert about a dog.

Near the end he could not say much, and we worked out that he would squeeze my hand once for yes. We got quite good at it. The last proper conversation we had, he wanted to know whether I had had the car serviced. I had not. He gave me a look that I will be able to see for the rest of my life.

Jim, the car is done. It cost more than you said it would.

To everyone who brought food, drove him to appointments, sat with him so I could get to the shop, or simply carried on treating him like a man rather than a patient: he noticed every bit of it, and so did I. He would want me to say so, and then he would want me to stop talking and put the kettle on.

Thank you.

5. Husband and father, given by his daughter

Sometimes the widow cannot speak, so an adult child does it. The voice changes completely: this one has to cover him as a husband and as a father at the same time.

I am Nina, and I am the youngest of Richard's three. Mum is in the front row, and she asked me to do this, so if it goes badly it is her fault.

My father was a GP in this town for twenty nine years. Some of you are here because he was your doctor. Some of you are here because he was your doctor at four in the morning, which is a different thing, and he never once made it feel like an imposition.

But I did not know him as a doctor. I knew him as a man who could not work the television.

He was a terrible singer and a very loud one. He cut the crusts off my sandwiches until I was fourteen and I was too embarrassed to tell him to stop. He wrote me a letter every term I was at university, actual letters, posted, always signed "your loving father, R. Hale", as though I might be unsure which Richard.

He and Mum were married thirty five years, and I want to say something about them as a pair, because that is most of what I saw. They had a system. He drove, she read the map, and they argued about it for thirty five years in exactly the same words, and both of them enjoyed it enormously. He made the tea. She made the decisions. When he retired she said she would give it six months before she was sick of him, and she was not, and I think that surprised them both.

He was not a soft man. He had standards, and he had a look, and all three of us learned to read that look at about the same age. He was also the person you rang when the wheels came off, and he would say "right" and then simply handle it, and he never once said I told you so, which he must have been thinking constantly.

Dad died on the Sunday morning with the four of us there, which is what he wanted, and he was not in pain.

I keep going to ring him. I expect I will for a long time yet. Twice this week I have got as far as the third digit before remembering.

If you want to do something for him, he thought most problems in this town could be solved by somebody checking in on their neighbour. So do that, and he will be unbearable about having been proved right.

Dad, from your loving youngest, N. Hale.

What is the best opening line for a eulogy?

The best opening line says who you are and one concrete thing about him, and nothing else. It does not announce that the day is difficult, because everyone already knows, and it does not open with a quotation, which only delays the moment you begin.

Openings that work for a husband, usable as written:

• "My name is Ruth. Tom and I were married for forty one years."
• "I was married to Peter for nineteen years, and I want to tell you about his hands."
• "Dave would want me to start with the barbecue."
• "There are three things my husband did every single day, and I will tell you about two of them."
• "We met in a queue at a bus station in 1979, and he talked at me for forty minutes."
• "He would not want a speech. He is getting one."

None of them is about grief. They are about him, in the first ten words, which is what gets you past the hardest sentence in the speech.

How long should a eulogy for a husband be?

Three to five minutes, which is about 500 to 750 words read aloud at a nervous pace. Five minutes is the outside edge of comfortable, and a eulogy for a husband tends to run shorter than one for a parent, because it rests on fewer, closer things.

If five minutes is beyond you this week, write 150 words and stop. Example 3 above is six sentences and it is a complete eulogy. Nobody times you, and nobody ever complains that the widow was brief. There are more short eulogy examples written out in full if that is the length you need.

One arrangement that helps: ask the celebrant to stand beside you and agree that if you stop being able to speak, they take the page and finish it. Knowing that is in place is usually what makes it unnecessary, and it is one of the things that actually work when you are trying to get through a eulogy without crying.

What do you do about the hard years?

Leave them out, or name them in one sentence and move on. Those are the only two options that work in a room, and both are honest.

Almost no long marriage is uncomplicated. A funeral is not the venue for the bad decade, and leaving it out is not lying: a eulogy is a few minutes about a man, not a sworn statement.

If silence would feel false to the people who lived through it, one plain sentence is enough. "We had some years that were very hard, and we came out the other side." "He was not always easy, and he knew that better than anyone." Then go straight back to something specific and good. Do not explain, and do not use the lectern to settle anything. If this is the whole problem rather than a footnote, the approach in writing a eulogy for a difficult person honestly applies to a husband too.

How to put your own husband into one of these

Replace the specifics, not the structure. The structure is doing the work.

Every example above is built the same way underneath: who you are and how long you were married, one daily habit described closely, what that habit says about him, two or three times he turned up for someone, the last few weeks in a sentence, one line spoken directly to him, then thank you. Swap in your kitchen, your gatepost, your Tuesday.

Three questions that produce usable material faster than trying to write prose:

1. What did he do every single day without being asked?
2. Who in this room would not be here if he had not done something for them?
3. What is the thing you keep reaching for and finding gone?

Answer those in rough notes, no sentences. Most people find they have 400 words of real material and that the shortage was never of things to say. If you would rather start from something already in paragraphs and cut it down, the eulogy writer turns those answers into a full first draft you can argue with, and you can read the preview before paying anything.

Questions people ask about a eulogy for a husband

What are some good eulogies for a husband?

The good ones are specific and short. The five above are complete and meant to be read aloud. What they share is that each rests on two or three concrete things he did, rather than a list of qualities. "He was kind, loving and generous" could be anybody. "He brought me tea every morning for forty one years" could only be him.

How do you write a good eulogy for a husband?

Answer three questions first: what he did daily, who he turned up for, and what you keep reaching for. Then arrange those notes in the order every example above uses, read it out loud once, and cut anything you cannot say without stopping. Most people need about an hour, not a week. From a blank page tonight, getting a draft down and editing it in your own words is usually faster.

What is a good poem to read at a husband's funeral?

Short, plain-spoken poems about absence rather than grand ones about death. The usual choices are "Remember" by Christina Rossetti, "He Is Gone" by David Harkins, "Funeral Blues" by W. H. Auden for something more dramatic, and "Death Is Nothing At All" by Henry Scott Holland, which is prose and reads easily. A poem works best after your eulogy and read by somebody else. Full texts are in the post on eulogy poems and readings.

What do you say in a short tribute to your late husband?

Say his name, how long you were married, one thing he did every day, and one sentence addressed to him. Four sentences covers an order of service, a graveside word or a notice in the paper. For example: "Peter, nineteen years, and you made me laugh in every one of them. Thank you for the dog, the garden and the patience. The house is very quiet. Save me a seat."

Who should give the eulogy at a husband's funeral?

Whoever can get through it, which is often not the widow, and that is a normal choice rather than a failure. Many families have the wife write it and an adult child or the celebrant read it out, which is what example 5 does. There is no order of precedence, and who gives the eulogy at a funeral is settled by the family rather than by custom.

You do not have to produce something equal to him. Nothing written this week will be, and he would be the first to say so.

Pick the example that sounds most like your own voice, put your kitchen and your gatepost and your Tuesday into it, and read it out once tonight to an empty room. If it helps to start from a draft rather than a blank page, there is a free preview here. The words only have to be true. They were never going to be enough.