Eulogy for Someone With Dementia: Who Do You Write About?

A eulogy for someone with dementia should be about who they were for decades, not the years the illness took. Name the dementia once, plainly, as something that happened to them rather than something they became. One honest sentence is usually enough, and it belongs late in the speech, not at the start.

If you are reading this, somebody died after a long decline, and you have been handed the speech.

Your problem is probably not a blank page. It is that you have two people to write about and only one speech. There is the person who raised you or married you or taught your children, and there is the person in the chair by the window who called you by the wrong name for three years. The second one is the most recent. That makes it the loudest, and it is not the one the room came for.

This page gives you the decision, the lines, and four complete eulogies you can take apart and use.

Which version of them do you write about?

Write about the long version. The decades, not the decline.

That is not denial and it is not a kindness you are doing them. It is accuracy. Someone who lived for eighty-one years and had dementia for four was themselves for ninety-five percent of their life. A speech that spends half its length on the last four years is simply wrong about the person, in the way a bad obituary is wrong.

So do the arithmetic before you write anything. Work out how many years they lived and how many years they were ill. Say the numbers out loud. On 2026 dates that usually comes out as something like seventy-nine and three, or sixty-four and six, and once you have heard it, the shape of the speech is obvious.

Then decide where the illness goes. It goes in once. Here are three ways people actually do it, written out:

• Early and brief, to clear the air: "She had vascular dementia for the last three years. I am going to mention that now, once, and then talk about the other eighty-three."
• Late and quiet, as part of the ending: "The last two years were hard and you all know it. What I want you to leave with is the biscuit tin."
• Not at all: "I am not going to talk about the care home. I am going to talk about the garden." Nobody in the room needs the medical history. They were there.

Any of the three is defensible. What does not work is the illness threaded through the whole speech, because then the illness is the subject.

Four eulogies for someone who had dementia

These are complete and ready to read aloud. Change the names, the jobs, the years and the details, and keep the shape. Each one is written in a different register, because families are different and you should pick the one that sounds like yours rather than the one that sounds like a funeral.

1. For a mother whose last two years were not her

Plain and steady. A daughter speaking. About four minutes.

My mother's name was Joan. For thirty-one years she taught year three at the same primary school, and for about the last two of her life she did not know that she had.

I want to talk about the thirty-one years.

She marked books at the kitchen table with the radio on, and she kept a biscuit tin in her desk drawer for the children who came to school without breakfast. She never said that was what it was for. If you asked, she said she liked biscuits.

She was not a soft woman. She was fair, which is different, and children can tell the difference immediately. Hundreds of adults in this town learned to read in her classroom. Some of you are sitting here.

At home she was funny in a dry way that my friends found alarming. She had strong opinions about tomatoes. She refused to learn the television remote on the grounds that she had got this far without it.

Dementia took the last part. I am not going to pretend it did not. There were two years when she called me by her sister's name, and a few months at the end when she did not call me anything. I used to drive home and think, that is not my mother.

I was wrong about that, and it took me a long time to work out why.

She was still polite to the staff. Every day, right to the end, when a care assistant brought her a cup of tea, she said thank you. She had forgotten my name and she had not forgotten her manners. Whatever was underneath all of it, the part that was actually her, that was the last thing to go.

So that is what I am taking. Not the diagnosis and not the last two years. A fair woman with a biscuit tin and strong views about tomatoes, who said thank you until she could not say anything at all.

Thank you for being here. She would have wanted me to say that properly, so: thank you.

2. For a father, the short one

Spare, almost no adjectives, a son speaking. Under two minutes, which is the right length for a crematorium slot with three speakers.

My dad was Peter Hale. He was a plumber for forty years in this town, and if your boiler went in 1988, he probably came out to it.

He was not a talker. He fixed things. That was how he said most of what he meant.

He had Alzheimer's for the last five years. I will say that once and then leave it, because five is not the measure of him and forty is closer.

Three things about my father.

He was never late. Not once, not for anything, which drove my mother mad, because it meant leaving the house twenty minutes early for everything.

He could not stay awake through a film and he would argue that he had.

And he taught all three of us to drive, in his van, with enormous patience, which surprised everybody including him.

He died on Tuesday morning and my sister was holding his hand.

Dad, the boiler is making a noise again. I have no idea what to do about it. Thank you for everything else.

3. For a grandmother who stayed herself almost to the end

Warm, and funny in places. A grandchild speaking. About three and a half minutes.

I am Ellie, and Margaret was my grandmother.

She had vascular dementia for her last three years, and I want to say up front that she was, almost to the end, entirely and recognisably herself. Forgetful, yes. Repetitive, often. Still Margaret.

She was born in 1939 and in eighty-six years she never once let anybody else make the gravy.

Things my grandmother believed: that a cardigan solves most problems. That the correct response to bad news is to put the kettle on. That you do not need a recipe if you have been doing it since you were nine. And that my grandfather, who died in 2011, was the handsomest man in Lancashire, a claim nobody in this room has ever been brave enough to check.

In the last couple of years she started telling me the same story every visit, about going dancing at the Palais in 1957 and the shoes she wore for it. By about the fortieth telling I knew it as well as she did, so I learned to ask the questions in the right places and let her do the good bits. It is one of the better things I have ever been part of, and I had no idea at the time.

She knew who I was until about six weeks before she died. Then she did not, and she was pleased to see me anyway, which I have decided to take.

What I want you to know is that she was kind in a practical way. She did not say comforting things. She arrived with a casserole, did your washing up and left. Three generations of this family have been loved like that, and it is the entire reason none of us can talk about our feelings, so I am going to stop.

Nan, the gravy is going to be terrible from now on. We will manage. Thank you for the dancing story. I am going to keep telling it.

4. For a parent you cared for, when the years were hard

Honest and unsentimental. The one to use if you were the carer and you are tired. About four minutes.

I am Michael. Patricia was my mother, and I looked after her for the last four years.

I am going to be honest, because she had no time for the other thing.

Those four years were hard. Some of them were worse than hard. There were nights I sat in the car outside her house and could not make myself go in. There were things she said to me that she would never have said, and that I have had to decide not to count. If you have cared for somebody with dementia you know exactly what I am describing, and if you have not, I am glad.

None of that is who she was. It is what happened to her, and separately it is what happened to us, and those are two different speeches. This one is about her.

Patricia was a nurse for twenty-six years, most of them on nights. She was tough, she was very funny, and she was not remotely interested in being liked, which made her extremely easy to like.

She raised the three of us on her own after 1994 and never once described that as difficult.

She taught me to cook exactly one dish, a shepherd's pie, on the theory that a man who can make one dinner will not starve. She was right, and I have made it badly every week for twenty years.

She said what she thought. At my wedding she told my wife, in front of people, that she had done well to take me on. They got on from that second.

Here is where I have landed. For four years I knew her as somebody who needed me. For thirty-six years before that I knew her as somebody who did not need anybody. Thirty-six is the number. The last four were the illness, and the illness was not her.

Mum, I did my best. You would tell me it was adequate. Thank you for all of it, including the hard part.

Lines you can use when the illness was long

Take these as they are. They are the sentences people get stuck on, written out so you do not have to invent them at midnight.

The sentence where you name the illness

Pick one. Say it once. Move on.

• "He had Alzheimer's for the last five years. I will say that once and then leave it."
• "Dementia took the last two years. It did not take the thirty before them."
• "She had vascular dementia. She was also, almost to the end, entirely herself."
• "For the last three years my father could not remember my name. He never once forgot to be glad to see me."
• "You all know what the last part was like. I am not going to describe it. She would have hated that."
• "Mum died on Thursday. In a real sense we started saying goodbye in 2019, and that is its own kind of hard."
• "He was ill for a long time. The man I am describing is the one who was here before that, and he was here for seventy-one years."
• "Dementia gets one sentence in this speech. This is it."
• "She forgot a great deal. She did not forget how to be kind, and I think that tells you where it lived."
• "I am not going to talk about the diagnosis. I am going to talk about the garden."
• "The last year was not her. I have stopped counting it, and I would like you to as well."

If you have the naming sentence and nothing else, you have more than you think. Write that one line down, then the opening, then the closing, and the middle is just three true stories in whatever order they happened. If even that feels like too much tonight, the eulogy writer will put a first draft on the page from a few answers about them, free to read before you pay for anything, and a draft you disagree with is far easier to work with than an empty screen.

Opening lines

The best opening for a long illness puts the room back in the right decade immediately.

• "My mother was a teacher for thirty-one years, and for the last two of her life she did not know that she had."
• "I want to start in 1974, because that is where she actually was for most of this."
• "Some of you only met my father in the last few years. I am going to introduce you to the rest of him."
• "We have been saying goodbye to Patricia for four years. Today is the last of it, so I want to get her right."
• "There is a version of my grandmother that only four of us in this room remember. I am going to describe her."

If none of those fit, the general openings in how to start a eulogy without freezing at the first line work here too, with the decade swapped in.

Closing lines

End on the long version of them, not the short one.

• "Thirty-six years, not four. That is the number I am keeping."
• "She forgot my name. She did not forget to say thank you. I will take that."
• "Dad, the boiler is making a noise again. Thank you for everything else."
• "If you remember one thing about her, make it the casserole and not the care home."
• "I am going to keep telling the dancing story. All of you are going to have to hear it."
• "She was herself for eighty-three years. Three years is not a life. Eighty-three is."

Do you talk about the dementia years in a eulogy?

Yes, briefly, if it is true and the room already knows. No, if saying it would be the only thing anybody remembers.

That is the whole test, and it is about the room rather than about you. At a funeral where thirty people visited the care home, pretending the last years did not happen reads as strange and slightly cold. Everybody is thinking about it. One plain sentence from the lectern lets the room put it down.

At a funeral where most people last saw them in 2019, a detailed account of the decline introduces something the room was not carrying and cannot do anything with. Keep it to a clause, or leave it out.

What to leave out either way: the stages, the hospital admissions, what they could and could not do by the end, anything you would describe to a doctor. The same rule covers all medical detail at a funeral, and what to include in a eulogy and what to leave out goes through it line by line.

And if the hard years included things said to you that were out of character, you are allowed to leave those out completely. You are not under oath. If the relationship was genuinely difficult before the illness as well, that is a different problem and writing a eulogy for a difficult person honestly is the page for it.

Questions people ask

What is the best opening line for a eulogy?

A specific fact about them, said flatly. "My mother taught year three for thirty-one years" works better than any general observation about loss, because it puts one real person in the room in nine words. For a long illness, the strongest openings also quietly reset the timeline, which is why so many of them contain a year.

What is a good poem to use at a funeral for someone with dementia?

Choose a poem about continuity rather than about memory. Anything whose subject is forgetting will land hard on a family who watched it happen. Short, plain poems about a person still being present in ordinary things work well, and so does a verse they themselves liked. There are twelve full texts grouped by tone in eulogy poems and readings.

How do you say goodbye to someone with dementia?

Usually in pieces, over years, which is why the funeral can feel like a formality. Families often describe a first goodbye at the diagnosis, a second when they stopped recognising you, and a third at the funeral. If that is your experience, you can say so from the lectern in one sentence. It gives everybody else permission to admit the same thing.

What happens when a parent with dementia dies?

Grief after a long decline often arrives in an order people are not expecting. Relief frequently comes first, then guilt about the relief, then the real grief weeks later. None of that is a failure of love and none of it needs to be in the eulogy. It is worth knowing in advance, because it explains why you may feel oddly flat while writing.

How long should a eulogy for someone with dementia be?

Three to five minutes, about 400 to 750 words, the same as any other eulogy. The illness does not change the length. What it changes is the balance: spend almost all of those words on the decades and at most one or two sentences on the last years. How long should a eulogy be has the word counts per minute if you want to time it.

One of the examples above is probably closer to your situation than the others. Start by typing out whichever one it is, in your own family's names and years, and then cut everything that is not true. What survives that is the speech. If you would rather not start from a blank page at all, the eulogy writer asks you a few questions and gives you a draft to argue with, free to read before you decide anything.

They were themselves for a very long time. That is the part you were asked to speak about, and you know it better than anybody in the room.