Eulogy for Someone You Were Estranged From: Four Speeches

A eulogy for someone you were estranged from does not have to pretend you were close. Say one true thing about who they were, name the distance in a single sentence without explaining it, and keep the speech shorter than the others. Four complete examples are below, for a sibling, an adult child, a grandparent and a friend.

You are probably in one of two situations. Someone asked you to speak because you are next of kin and the family assumes you will, or you asked to speak yourself and are now wondering whether you had the right to.

Either way the problem is the same. There are years you were not there for, and some of the people in that room were. You do not have the stories the other speakers have. You have the beginning, a gap, and an ending you found out about by phone.

That is a writing problem with a solution. It is not a reason to say no.

Why this is a different writing job

The difference is that the subject of the speech is their life, and the thing you are worried about is your absence from it. Those are two separate problems and people collapse them into one.

Most advice about a complicated eulogy assumes the complication was their behaviour. That is a different case, and if the honest difficulty is that they were hard to be around, writing a eulogy for a difficult person is the page you want instead. Estrangement is quieter than that. Plenty of estrangements are nobody's crime. People drift, someone moves, a disagreement hardens, and ten years go by with everyone intending to fix it later.

So the speech does not need a verdict on the relationship. It needs one sentence that tells the room where you stood, so nobody spends your whole speech wondering, and then it needs to get out of its own way and talk about them.

The one sentence that names the distance

Name the distance once, early, in a single sentence, and never explain it. One sentence buys you honesty. Two sentences starts a defence, and a defence turns your speech into a speech about you.

Any of these work. Say it plainly and move on:

• "We had not spoken in nine years. I am not going to spend this speech on why."
• "There is a long stretch in the middle of my brother's life that I was not part of."
• "I knew her for the first twenty years and not the last fifteen."
• "My daughter and I were not in touch at the end. That is the truth, and it is not the only truth about her."
• "I will not pretend I knew him lately. I knew him early, and I remember it clearly."
• "Some of you spent more of the last decade with her than I did. I am glad she had you."
• "We fell out in 2011 over something that does not matter today."
• "I was not in his life for a long time. I was in it for the part where he was eight."

Then there are the lines that sound right and say nothing. These are the ones that circulate, and they are interchangeable. They would fit any dead person on earth:

• "We had our difficulties, but I always cherished her spirit."
• "Our relationship taught me a great deal about resilience and perspective."
• "Whatever happened between us, love was always there underneath."

Swap each one for something with a fact in it. "I always cherished her spirit" becomes "She sent a card every single birthday, including the nine years we did not speak." "Love was always there underneath" becomes "He kept my school photo in his wallet. His neighbour told me that this week." A fact cannot be argued with and it cannot be recycled into somebody else's funeral.

What to say when you do not have the stories

Use three sources, in this order: what you remember from before, what you have been told by people who were there, and what you can see from the life they built without you. Any one of those is enough for a short speech. Together they are plenty.

What you remember from before. The years you had are real and they are yours. Nobody else in the room has the eight-year-old version of this person. That is not a consolation prize, it is material no other speaker can offer.

• "Before any of this, he was the one who taught me to ride a bike on the hill outside our house, which was a terrible place to learn."
• "She was fourteen and she could do a dead-on impression of our mother, and she would do it while our mother was in the room."
• "I remember him asleep in a chair with a book on his chest, which I am told he was still doing in his seventies."

What other people tell you. Ask three or four of them this week. Not "tell me about her" but something narrow enough to answer: what did she do on a Sunday, what was she like to work with, what did she complain about. You are looking for one habit and one object, not a biography. The same method is laid out in more detail in the page on writing a eulogy for someone you did not know well, and it works even better here, because you have the early years to hang the borrowed stories on.

• "Her friend Sandra told me she had a specific chair in the garden and a rule about who could sit in it."
• "Three separate people this week told me the same story, which means he told it a lot."
• "I learned on Tuesday that he had been doing the quiz at the same pub every Thursday for eleven years."

What you can see from the outside. Look at the room. Look at who came, what they are wearing, what they are crying about. A life you were not in still leaves evidence, and saying what you see out loud is one of the most honest things you can do from a lectern.

• "I did not know she had this many friends. I am looking at the proof of it."
• "Somebody in this room taught him to cook, because he certainly could not when I knew him."
• "Whatever he built in those years, it filled a church. That tells me something I did not know on Monday."

Four complete eulogies you can adapt

Each one is written for a different relationship and a different kind of distance. Read them out loud and change the names and the facts. If a line is not true about your person, cut it rather than soften it. The parent case has a page of its own, with speeches for an estranged mother or father, so it is not repeated here.

1. For an estranged sibling, after a long childhood and a long silence

My name is Tom. Michael was my older brother.

We had not spoken in eleven years. I am not going to spend this speech on why, because it was small and it got old, and because there is a better use of four minutes.

I had him for eighteen years before that. So let me tell you about the part I had.

Michael was nine when I was born and he never entirely forgave me for it. He called me The Interruption until I was about six. He also walked me to school every day for four years and threatened a boy called Gary on my behalf, and both of those things were true about him at the same time. He was annoyed with you and he turned up for you. That never changed, as far as I can tell.

He was the one who taught me to ride a bike, on the hill outside our house, which was a terrible place to learn. He ran behind me holding the saddle and then he let go without telling me, which I think explains a certain amount about both of us.

He could not sit still. He took things apart. Our mother once came home to the inside of the washing machine on the kitchen floor and Michael, aged thirteen, holding a spanner and saying it was fine.

People have been telling me things this week. Dave told me he had the same van for nineteen years and refused to replace it. Louise told me he fixed her fence and would not take money for it and then complained about having fixed it for a year afterwards. That is him. I recognise every bit of that.

There is something I want to say about the eleven years. I always thought there was time. I think he did too. If I had known how this ended I would have rung him, and I did not, and I have to carry that rather than explain it away.

But I am not going to let eleven years stand in for forty-nine. He was my brother for all of it. He was the keeper of the only version of my childhood that anyone else remembers.

Thank you for looking after him in the years I did not.

Goodbye, Mike. You let go of the saddle too early, as usual.

2. For an estranged adult child, spoken by a parent

This is the hardest one to write and the hardest one to stand up and read. Keep it short, keep the blame out of it, and do not use the lectern to make a case.

I am Anne. Rachel was my daughter.

Rachel and I were not in touch for the last six years of her life. That is the truth and I am not going to dress it up. It is also not the only truth about her, and it is nowhere near the most important one.

She was a serious child. At four she corrected adults. At seven she wrote me a letter of complaint about bedtime, on lined paper, with numbered points. I still have it. Point three was that she was not tired and had never been tired.

She was funny in a dry way that people did not always catch the first time. She was stubborn in the way that gets things done and also in the way that costs you.

I do not know the last six years. I know them only from this week, from all of you. I know that she ran a team of nine and that they liked her. I know she took up open water swimming, which horrifies me. I know she had a dog called Biscuit who is apparently enormous. I have been shown eleven photographs of this dog.

What I want to say about those years is this. I am glad they were full. I am glad she was loved in them by people who are here. Whatever the distance between us, she was clearly not alone, and a mother can be grateful for that without being able to explain the rest.

I had her for twenty-nine years. I was there for the first word, the first day of school, the broken arm, the exam results, the move to the city. I am her mother. That did not stop being true during the quiet years and it has not stopped being true now.

Rachel, I am sorry for my part in it. I loved you the whole time, including the years you did not hear it from me.

3. For a grandparent you barely knew, when the estrangement was not yours

I am Priya. Vijay was my grandfather.

I should say at the start that I did not know him well. There was a falling out between him and my father before I was born, and I grew up at the far end of it. I met him four times that I can remember.

So I am not going to stand here and claim a closeness I did not have. What I can do is tell you about the four times, because I remember all of them, which probably tells you something.

The first time I was six. He gave me a pound coin and told me not to tell my mother, and he had a laugh that arrived before the joke finished.

The second time I was eleven and he asked me what I was reading and then actually listened to the answer, which no adult had done that year.

The third time was a wedding. He danced. Badly, and for a long time.

The fourth time was two years ago, in a hospital corridor, and we talked about cricket for twenty minutes because neither of us knew how to start the other conversation. I am glad we talked about cricket. It was better than nothing and it was not nothing.

What I have learned this week is how much I missed. My cousin tells me he kept a list of every grandchild's birthday in the back of a diary, mine included, and that he asked after me. I did not know that on Monday. I know it now and I am going to keep it.

I am sorry I did not get more than four days of him. I am glad the rest of you got years.

Goodbye, Dada. Thank you for the pound coin, and for listening about the book.

4. For a friend you fell out with

Jen and I were best friends for nineteen years and then we were not, and I still do not think either of us could tell you exactly how that happened. We fell out in 2019 over something that does not matter today, and neither of us rang, out of pride, for six years.

I have been given four minutes, so here is Jen.

She was late to everything. Not slightly late. She was forty minutes late to her own thirtieth and arrived with a cake she had bought for herself because she did not trust anyone else to get the right one. She was right not to trust us.

She swore at traffic. She was the most generous person I have ever met with other people's problems and the worst in the world at admitting she had any of her own. She would drive two hours to sit with you and then say she was in the area.

She gave terrible advice confidently and good advice quietly, and you had to learn to tell which was which.

About the six years. I have spent this week thinking that if I had rung her she would have picked up, and she has probably spent some of the last six years thinking the same thing in reverse. We were both waiting for the other one to be the bigger person, and we both ran out of time, and that is a stupid way for nineteen years to end.

So if you are in a bad patch with somebody in this room, ring them this week. You will not get a better warning than this one.

Jen, I am sorry I was proud. You were a great friend and a dreadful timekeeper and I will miss you for a long time.

How long should it be?

Aim for 350 to 550 words, which runs about two and a half to four minutes at a normal speaking pace of roughly 140 words a minute. That is shorter than a standard eulogy on purpose.

Two reasons. A shorter speech is honest about the ground you can actually cover, and a shorter speech is far easier to get through when your own feelings about the person are unresolved. If you only have the early years and three borrowed stories, 400 words is a complete speech. Stretching it to a thousand means padding, and padding in this situation sounds like a case being made. If you want the arithmetic on timing, the page on short eulogy examples has versions timed down to ninety seconds. You can also see a free draft built from a few questions and cut it down from there, which is easier than writing into an empty page.

What to do if the room knows more than you do

Say so, once, in the speech, and then stop managing it. The room is not grading you on attendance. Most of the people listening already know roughly what happened, and a speaker who acknowledges it in one plain sentence is a relief to them, not a problem.

Some practical things that help:

• Speak earlier in the service rather than last if you get a choice. The last speaker is heard as the closing word on the person, and that is not the position you want.
• Tell the person organising the funeral what you plan to say about the distance. One sentence, in advance, by text. It stops a surprise at the front of a church.
• Do not answer back. If someone in the family is angry that you are speaking, that argument is not going to be settled from a lectern, and trying will cost you the speech.
• Write out the hard sentence and read it off the paper. Do not trust yourself to say the distance sentence from memory. It is the line most likely to come out wrong.
• Have a second reader ready. Give a copy to someone who can finish it if you cannot. Tell them beforehand, not on the day.

Frequently asked questions

What to do when an estranged sibling dies?

Decide first whether you are going, then whether you are speaking, and treat those as separate questions. You can attend without speaking, and you can send words to be read by someone else without attending. If you do speak, keep it to 350 to 550 words, name the estrangement in one sentence, and build the speech from the years you did have rather than the years you did not.

What is the best opening line for a eulogy?

The best opening line states who you are and who they were to you, in that order, in under ten words. "My name is Tom. Michael was my older brother." It sounds plain on the page and it works in a room, because the first thing every listener wants is to know who is speaking and why.

What is the best last line of a eulogy?

Speak directly to the person, in one short sentence, using the name you actually called them. "Goodbye, Mike." "Thank you for the pound coin." A last line aimed at the room asks for a reaction, and a last line aimed at the person does not, which is why it lands.

What to say when an estranged family member dies?

Say that they died, that it is complicated, and nothing else you do not mean. To the family: "I am sorry. I know it was not simple between us and I am still sorry he is gone." To yourself, when people ask how you are: "Complicated" is a complete answer and you do not owe anyone the detail.

What is a good sympathy message to send to someone who has lost an estranged family member?

Acknowledge the complication rather than skipping over it. "I am sorry about your sister. I know it was difficult and I imagine that makes it harder, not easier." Avoid "at least" in any form, and avoid any version of "now you can have peace with it." Grief after estrangement is not tidier than other grief and it is usually less so.

Can you give a short example of a eulogy for an estranged sister?

Here is one at ninety seconds, which is a complete speech:

Claire was my sister. We had not spoken properly since 2017, and I am not going to spend this speech on that.

I had her for thirty years first. She taught me to drive in a car park in Leeds and she was a far better teacher than our father, mostly because she swore more. She was the only person who called me Bug. She remembered every birthday, including the ones she was not speaking to me on, which I only worked out this week looking through a drawer of cards.

I have learned a lot about her in the last five days. I would rather have learned it from her.

Claire, I am sorry we ran out of time. Thank you for the driving lessons.

One last thing

You are not standing up to settle anything. You are standing up to say that this person existed, that you knew a part of them, and that the part you knew was worth describing out loud.

Four hundred honest words will do that. You do not need the years back to manage four hundred words.