Eulogy for a Wife Examples for Five Different Marriages

A eulogy for a wife usually runs three to five minutes, about 500 to 750 words, and works best when it is built from three or four specific things she actually did rather than a list of her qualities. One ordinary habit of hers will say more than a paragraph about how kind she was.

You have probably been given a few days. Someone has asked you to speak, or you offered before you understood what you were offering, and now it is late and the page is empty.

What follows is five complete eulogies for a wife, written out in full, for five marriages that look nothing like each other. One for a long marriage. One for a woman who was funnier than her husband. One after a long illness. One where the marriage was hard and pretending otherwise would be unbearable to say out loud. And one very short, for a man who already knows his voice will not hold.

Take any of them and put your own names and your own three details in. That is what they are for. Nobody at the funeral has read this page.

Five eulogies for a wife, written out in full

Each one is complete and can be read as it stands. The lengths vary on purpose, from about ninety seconds to four minutes.

1. For a wife after a long marriage

Plain and steady, built on one object in the house. Read this one if you were married a long time and the problem is that there is too much to say.

Patricia and I were married for forty eight years. I have spent four days trying to find a way to tell you what that was like, and the best I can do is tell you about the kitchen table.

She bought that table in 1979 for eleven pounds from a man clearing out his mother's house. It was too big for the room. I said so at the time. She said we would grow into it. Three children did their homework on it. Her mother died at the far end of it with all of us standing round. Pat sat at that table every morning of her life with the first tea of the day and the radio on low, and if you came to our house before eight o'clock, that is where you found her.

I do not want to turn her into a saint, because she would have had something to say about that. She was stubborn. She kept a grudge going against our neighbour for twenty years over a hedge. She was never once on time for anything that was not a train.

But she noticed people. That is what I keep coming back to. She noticed when someone had gone quiet, and she was the one who rang. I think half of you in this room have had a phone call from Pat that you did not know you needed, and she would never have mentioned it to me afterwards, because she did not think she had done anything.

She worked in the school office for twenty two years. Children who are now in their forties still called her Mrs Doyle in the street. She liked that more than she let on.

She kept a list on the back of an envelope of places she wanted to see, and we got to four of them. I used to think of that as a failure of mine. This week I found the envelope and saw that she had crossed off the four and written good at the bottom.

We were not a romantic couple. I never wrote her a poem. I made her a cup of tea every morning for forty eight years, and on the last morning she could still drink one, she said it was too strong. I said it had been too strong for forty eight years. She laughed at that. That is my marriage, the whole of it, in one cup of tea.

People have been very kind this week. They keep telling me we had a good long run, and we did. I know exactly how lucky that was. It does not make the house any less quiet.

Pat, you were right about the table. We grew into it.

Thank you all for coming. She would have counted the cars.

2. For a wife who was funnier than you were

Lighter, and it is allowed to get a laugh. A funeral will take humour if the humour is true and the speech lands somewhere soft.

I need to say at the start that Marie would have done this better than me. She did everything of this kind better than me. If she were standing here doing mine, you would all have been crying by now, and then laughing, and she would have finished two minutes early.

Marie was funny. Not nice funny. Properly funny, the kind that takes no prisoners. She had a nickname for every one of my colleagues, none of which I can repeat in a church, and she was right about all of them. When I got the promotion I had wanted for six years, she looked at the letter, looked at me, and said, well, they have clearly run out of people.

She told the story of our wedding day for thirty one years and it got worse every single time. By the end of it I had fainted, which I did not, and the best man had been arrested, which he was not, and the vicar had asked her twice whether she was sure. That last part is true.

What I want you to know is what the jokes were doing. Marie used them to get into a room and sit beside people. She made my mother laugh eleven days after my father died, which no one else in this family managed. She made the young nurses on ward nine laugh in August, when she was the one in the bed, and they came back on their breaks to see her, and I know exactly why they did.

She was not a tough woman. She just had a way of standing in front of a hard thing and making it smaller so the rest of us could get past it. She did that for me more times than I understood at the time.

She was also the only person in this family who could tell my mother she was wrong. She did it at Christmas 2011, at the table, in front of everybody, and my mother laughed and poured her a drink, and from that day the two of them were thick as thieves. I had been trying to manage that relationship for nine years. Marie fixed it in one sentence I am still not allowed to repeat.

Three weeks ago she told me she had decided what she wanted played at the end of this, and then she told me, and I said absolutely not. So we are playing it. You will hear it shortly. I am sorry in advance. She is not.

Marie, you were the funniest person in every room you ever walked into, including this one, and you are still the funniest person in it.

Go and have a drink and tell each other the wedding story. Get it wrong. She would prefer that.

3. For a wife who was ill for a long time

For a death that everyone saw coming and nobody was ready for. The illness goes in, but it does not get to be the story.

Sarah was ill for two years and four months. I want to say one thing about that and then put it down, because it took up enough of her life and it is not getting this as well.

She was not brave about it, not in the way people mean. She was frightened, and she was furious, and on a bad Tuesday in February she threw a plastic beaker at a wall and then apologised to the wall. She was also, right through it, completely herself. The illness never got hold of the part of her that mattered. That is the only thing I have to say about the cancer.

Here is Sarah. She was a primary school teacher for thirty years and she could silence a hall of two hundred children by raising one eyebrow. She read in the bath until the water went cold and then ran more hot and kept reading. She could not sing and sang anyway, loudly, mostly in the car, mostly wrong.

She was the one who said yes. Every time. I was the one who worked out whether we could afford it, and she was the one who had already said yes. The dog, the extension, Rachel's year in Spain, the camper van that lasted one winter. If it was a choice between a sensible answer and a good story, Sarah picked the story every time, and I spent thirty one years being dragged into the best parts of my own life.

She taught Rachel and Tom to swim in the sea at Lahinch, in September, in water that was far too cold, because she said a pool teaches you nothing. Both of them still swim. Tom swims in the sea in January now, which she thought was showing off. She kept every card the children in her class ever made her, in two shoeboxes in the back bedroom, and I have them, and I am not going to be able to throw them out.

The last few months were slow. We had time, which is a strange gift and I am grateful for it and I would not want anyone to think it was gentle. We talked about everything. We watched a lot of bad television. She wanted to know what I was going to do about the garden and she did not accept my first answer.

What I will remember is not the hospital. It is her in the doorway of the kitchen with her coat already on, keys in her hand, asking if I was coming, in that voice that meant we were leaving whether or not I was coming.

I was always coming, love. You knew that.

Thank you for being here. She would have wanted the sandwiches started already.

4. For a wife when the marriage was not easy

Written for a man who cannot stand up and describe a marriage he did not have. This one is honest without being cruel, and it does not explain anything to the room.

Helen and I were married for twenty six years, and we were separated for four of them in the middle. Most of you know that. I am saying it out loud because Helen could not stand being managed, and I am not going to stand here and manage her.

We were difficult together. We were both stubborn and we were both quick, and we said things in the nineties that took a long time to put down. Some of it was my fault and more of it than I admitted at the time. I am not going to stand here and sort out who was right. She is not here to argue and it would not be a fair fight.

What I can tell you is what she was, which is not the same as what we were.

Helen was the most capable person I have ever met. She ran a ward of forty beds and she could tell you the name of every patient's daughter. She rebuilt the back wall of our house with a book from the library and it is still standing and it is better than the one the builder did. When her brother lost his job she had him in the spare room the same week and never once mentioned it to anyone.

She was not warm in the way people expect women to be warm. She was something better than that. She was reliable. If Helen said she would be there at six, she was there at six, and if you were in actual trouble she was there before you had finished the sentence. I knew two difficult years where the only person who rang me was Helen, and we were not even living together.

She was also, and I say this as the man who was married to her, not an easy woman to apologise to. You had to do it properly. No half sentences and no excuses tacked on the end. I worked out how to do it properly at about year nineteen, and our last seven years were a great deal better for it.

We found our way back. I want that on the record, because the four years are the bit people know about and the eighteen afterwards are the bit they do not. The last ten years were quiet and they were good. We had a routine. We had a dog neither of us wanted. On Sunday mornings we read the paper and did not talk, and that was the best hour of my week for a decade.

It was not a simple marriage and she was not a simple woman, and I would not have swapped her for a simpler one.

Helen, I got there in the end. I know it took me a while.

5. A very short one, for when you know your voice will not hold

Under ninety seconds. Six short paragraphs, one specific memory, and then you sit down. Nobody has ever thought less of a widower for keeping it short.

I am Michael. Jean was my wife for thirty four years.

I am not going to manage a long speech, so I am going to tell you one thing about her and then sit down.

Jean fed everybody. Every single person who came to our door got fed, whether they wanted it or not. Workmen. The woman doing the census. My brother, for about nine months in 1998. You could not get out of that house hungry.

That was how she said it. She was not a woman for big words. She put a plate in front of you, and that was her telling you she was glad you had come.

There are a lot of you here today, and I know every one of you has eaten in our kitchen.

Thank you for coming. Please eat something.

How do I write a eulogy for my wife?

Write down three specific things she did, then build the speech around them. Not three qualities, three things: an object, a habit, a sentence she said too often. A eulogy for a wife is a short speech, usually three to five minutes, in which you tell a room who she was through a few concrete things she actually did, and detail is what makes it hers rather than anyone's.

The quickest method, when you have an evening and no draft, is to answer four questions in writing and then join them up. What did she do every day without thinking about it? What did she say so often that the family quotes it? What did she do for someone else that she never took credit for? What is the one thing you want these particular people to know? Four honest answers is a eulogy. If you want something on the page tonight to argue with, the eulogy writer asks you a version of those questions and gives you a full draft free to preview, which is easier to edit than a blank screen.

Leave out the full biography. Dates and job titles are what an obituary is for. One fact about how you met is usually enough.

What is a good opening line for a eulogy?

The best opening line is your name, her name, and how long you were married. It takes four seconds, it tells the room who is speaking, and it gets you past the first breath, which is the hardest one. Clever openings are a risk you do not need to take.

Lines that work, said plainly:

• I am David. Anne was my wife for twenty nine years.
• For those of you who do not know me, I am Tom, and Carol put up with me for forty one years.
• I want to start by thanking you all for being here. Ruth would not have believed this many of you came.
• I am going to tell you about my wife. I will probably stop once or twice.

That last one is worth taking seriously. Saying it out loud at the start gives you permission to pause later, and it stops the room worrying on your behalf.

How long should a eulogy for a wife be?

Three to five minutes, which is 500 to 750 words read aloud at a normal pace. Most people read at about 140 words a minute, and slower than that at a funeral.

Shorter is safer than longer. A ninety second eulogy that holds together is better than a six minute one that loses the room in the middle, and a funeral director will never complain that you kept it tight. Example five above is about 170 words and takes well under two minutes. If you are reading alongside children or grandchildren, keep yours to three minutes so the service does not run long.

What if I cannot get through it?

Stop, breathe, and start the sentence again. The room is on your side and nobody is timing you. This happens constantly and it has never once ruined a funeral.

Three things help more than willpower. Print it in 16 point with a blank line between every paragraph, so you can find your place after a pause. Mark one short sentence in the middle that you could stop on if you had to, so there is always a safe landing. And give a copy to one other person before the service, somebody who can come up and finish it if you need them to, which almost nobody ends up needing but everybody is glad they arranged. There is more on the mechanics of this in our piece on how to deliver a eulogy without crying.

Questions people ask

What should I write in a funeral speech for my wife?

Write what she did, not what she was like. One object, one habit, one thing she did for someone else, and one sentence she said often. Then say what you miss, in plain words. A funeral speech for a wife does not need a theme or a tidy ending, and the specific domestic details are the parts people repeat afterwards in the car park.

What is the best last line of a eulogy?

Speak to her directly, in one short sentence, and then thank the room. Something like, you were right about the table, or, I was always coming, love. Turning to address her by name is the ending that works most often, because it is the only moment in the speech where you stop performing. We collected a dozen of these in how to end a eulogy.

Should I mention how she died?

One sentence, early, and then move on. Example three does this deliberately: it names the illness, says one true thing about it, and puts it down. If the death was recent and public, the room already knows, and skipping it entirely can feel like a silence. Nothing clinical, no dates, no details of treatment.

Is it all right to read it off paper?

Yes, and almost everybody does. Nobody expects a widower to speak from memory, and holding paper gives your hands something to do. Print it large, staple it, and number the pages in case you drop them.

Can I write a eulogy for my wife if we were separated?

Yes, and honesty works better than a performance of a marriage you did not have. Example four is written for exactly this. Name the separation once in plain words if the room knows about it, do not argue the case, and spend the speech on who she was rather than on what went wrong between you. If you are reading this from the other side of the same loss, there are five more speeches on our eulogy for a husband page.

Take whichever of the five is closest and put your own three details in. It will not sound like a template once her name and your kitchen are in it.

And if it is late and there is still nothing on the page, you can read a free preview of a draft before you decide anything. Either way, the words will be yours by Saturday.