Eulogy Ideas When the Facts Don't Add Up to a Speech

A good eulogy idea is one small specific thing only someone who knew them would know, not a fact from their life story. Sixteen of those angles are below, each with a real line you can borrow and bend. Pick three, write one true sentence under each, and you have the shape of a speech.

Search for eulogy ideas and almost every page gives you the same list: date of birth, where they went to school, who their family were, how they met their husband. That list is an obituary. Read aloud, it sounds like a CV.

A eulogy idea is a single specific thing about the person that only somebody who knew them could supply, and that a stranger could not have guessed from their life story. The tape measure in the pocket. The chair by the window. The woman they drove to the garden centre every Sunday for nine years and never mentioned.

Below are sixteen of those angles, grouped by where to look, with a real line under each so you can see the size of the thing you are aiming for. Then two complete eulogies built from three ideas each.

Ideas from one object

Objects are the easiest place to start because you do not have to remember anything. You just have to look around their house, or the boot of their car, and say what is there.

1. The thing they always had on them

Keys, a tape measure, a specific pen, a lighter they did not use any more. Name it, then say what they did with it.

Dad had a tape measure in his pocket every day of his working life, and for about ten years after he stopped working. He measured things nobody needed measured. Door frames in other people's houses. The boot of my first car, to prove the pram would fit. He was right about the pram.

2. The chair, the spot, the room

Almost everybody has a place in the house that was theirs by unspoken agreement. Describe the place and what they could see from it.

There was a chair in the front window that was hers, and we all knew it was hers, and not one of us ever said so out loud. She sat in it with the curtain pulled back about four inches so she could see who was coming up the road. If you walked up that road, she knew before you knocked.

3. What was actually in the car, the bag or the shed

Make a list. Do not tidy it up. The specifics do the work and the strangeness of a real list is the point.

The glovebox of my mother's car held, on the day she died: eleven pens, a plastic rain hood, three separate pairs of reading glasses, and a photograph of us at Whitby in 1994 that had been in there so long the sun had taken most of the colour out of it. She drove around with that photo for thirty years and never mentioned it once.

4. Their handwriting

A shopping list, a birthday card, a note on the back of an envelope. If you have one, you can hold it up or just describe it.

I have a shopping list in his handwriting on the fridge. Bread, bin bags, the good coffee. He wrote in capitals, always, because he said nobody could read him otherwise. It has been there since March and I have not taken it down.

Ideas from the way they talked

You will remember how somebody sounded long after you have forgotten what they did for a living. Say the words in their words.

5. The phrase they said a hundred times

Every family has at least one. Quote it, then give two or three situations they used it in. The repetition is the joke and the ache at the same time.

My grandfather's answer to almost everything was, we'll see. Can I stay up? We'll see. Will the car get us to Cornwall? We'll see. It sounded like a no and it was nearly always a yes, and I have caught myself saying it to my own children twice this week.

6. The advice they gave everybody

The thing they told anyone who would stand still. It tells the room what they believed without you having to say the word values.

She told every single person who got engaged the same thing: never go to bed in separate rooms. She told it to people she had met twice. She told it to my friend Dan at a bus stop. Forty-one years with my father, so I suppose she had earned the right to repeat herself.

7. What they called you

Nicknames are a short cut to how somebody saw you, and they are usually funny, which buys the room a breath.

I was Trouble. Not as a telling off, it was simply my name in that house from about the age of four. My sister was Madam. My brother, who never did a single wrong thing in his life, was Boy. He got the worst of it.

8. The thing they never said

This one is for the complicated ones. You are not accusing them. You are naming the gap and then saying what filled it.

My father never once said he was proud of me, and he never once missed anything I did. Not a school play, not a hospital appointment, not one Tuesday night match in the rain. I waited a long time for the sentence. I have stopped needing it, because somewhere in the last few weeks I worked out that the Tuesdays were the sentence.

Ideas from what they did when nobody was watching

These are the ideas that change a room, because most of the people in it will not have heard them before. Ask the family what they did on an ordinary Wednesday.

9. The small repeated kindness

Not the dramatic gesture. The boring one, done for years, that they never got any credit for.

Every Sunday for nine years she drove a woman called Pat to the garden centre. Pat was not a friend exactly. Pat was somebody from church who had stopped being able to drive. They had a cup of tea, they bought compost nobody needed, and then she drove Pat home. Nine years of Sundays. She never told us she was doing it. We found out from Pat.

10. The job, done their way

Not the job title. The craft inside it, and the one detail that shows they cared about doing it properly.

He was a postman for thirty-two years and he knew which gates stuck, which dogs were all noise, and which letterboxes would take your fingers off. He also knew which houses were on their own. He would knock on those ones, just once, with the post still in his hand, so somebody had a face to look at that morning.

11. The hobby nobody else understood

You do not have to explain the appeal. Admitting you never understood it is often truer and warmer than pretending you did.

She kept bees. I never fully worked out why. She would stand in a field in August in a veil, completely calm, surrounded by thousands of them, and she told me once it was the only time all week her head went quiet. I have her smoker in the garage and no intention of ever using it.

12. How they treated people who could do nothing for them

Waiters, cleaners, the man at the tip, a cold caller. This is character, shown rather than claimed.

He talked to waiters. Properly talked to them, asked their names, asked how long the shift was, remembered the answer next time. It embarrassed me horribly when I was fifteen. I do it myself now, badly, and I have noticed that people who do it have usually been taught by somebody.

Ideas from the people who will be in the room

A eulogy is a speech to a specific group of people on a specific afternoon. Four ideas that only work because of who is sitting there.

13. The thing everybody in the room will recognise

Start with a shared experience and the room nods together. That nod is worth more than any sentence you could write about their character.

If you are sitting here today, you have at some point been handed a plate of food you did not ask for and could not refuse. That was the house. You came in, you sat down, a plate arrived. You were fed whether you were hungry or not, and you were not allowed to help with the washing up.

14. The one story only you have

Say out loud that nobody else knows it. That sentence makes the room lean in, and it earns your place at the front.

Nobody else knows this one. The night before my wedding he came into the kitchen at about one in the morning, sat down opposite me, and told me he had been terrified on his own wedding day and had been sick in a hedge outside the church. He had never told anybody. He told me because I needed it, and then he went back to bed.

15. What they taught somebody who is not you

A grandchild, a trainee, a neighbour's kid. It shows the person outlasting themselves without you having to say anything that grand.

My daughter is eight and she can gut a fish, because of him. She can whistle through her fingers, which I cannot. And when anything goes wrong she says the thing he always said on the boat: right, that's interesting. She will have that for the rest of her life and she will not remember where she got it.

16. The thing the room is already thinking

If the death was sudden, or young, or after a long illness, everybody there is holding the same sentence. You can say it for them, early, and then move on.

I know what a lot of you are thinking, because I have thought it every day for three weeks. It was too quick. There was no time to say anything. So I am going to say it now, out loud, for all of us, and then we can get on with remembering her properly.

Two complete eulogies built from three ideas each

Three ideas is enough for a four minute speech. Here are two, written out in full, so you can see that nothing else is needed. The first uses ideas 1, 5 and 9. The second uses 11, 12 and 15.

A eulogy for a father, from one object and one phrase and one quiet kindness

My dad had a tape measure in his pocket every day of his working life, and for about ten years after he stopped working. He measured things nobody needed measured. Door frames in other people's houses. The boot of my first car, to prove the pram would fit. He was right about the pram.

I am Michael. He was my father, and I am going to keep this short because he would have wanted it short.

If you asked him anything, the answer was we'll see. Can I stay up? We'll see. Will the car get us to Cornwall and back? We'll see. It sounded like a no and it was nearly always a yes, and I have caught myself saying it to my own two this week without meaning to. My son asked what it meant. I said it means your grandad has already decided and he is not telling you yet.

Here is something most of you will not know. For nine years, every Sunday, he drove a woman called Pat to the garden centre. Pat was not a friend exactly. She was somebody from the church who had stopped being able to drive. They had a cup of tea, they bought compost nobody needed, and he drove her home. Nine years of Sundays. He never mentioned it to us once. We found out because Pat rang the house the Monday after he died and asked, very politely, whether anybody else might be going this week.

I think that was the whole man. He was not a talker. He did not tell you things about himself and he would have hated every minute of this. He just turned up. He turned up for Pat. He turned up for my mother for forty-one years. He turned up for every awful school play and every Tuesday night match in the rain, standing on the touchline in that green coat, saying nothing, and then on the way home telling me what I had done wrong in the second half.

He never once told me he was proud of me. I waited a long time for that sentence, and there were a few years in my twenties when I was angry about it. I have stopped waiting, because somewhere in the last three weeks I worked out that the Tuesdays were the sentence.

Dad, the pram did fit. You were right. You were right about most of it.

Thank you all for coming.

A eulogy for a friend, from a hobby and a habit and one thing she taught my son

Ruth kept bees. I never fully understood why, and I knew her for twenty-six years.

I am Caro. Ruth and I met in 1999, in a job we both disliked, and we stayed friends long after we had both forgotten the name of the company.

She would stand in a field in August in a veil, completely calm, surrounded by thousands of them, and she told me once it was the only time all week her head went quiet. I have her smoker in my garage now. I have no intention of ever using it and I am not going to get rid of it either.

Here is what I would like the people who only knew her a bit to know. Ruth talked to waiters. Properly talked to them. Asked their names, asked how long the shift was, remembered the answer the next time we went in. I found it mortifying in my twenties. I do it myself now, badly, and I have noticed that the people who do it have usually been taught by somebody.

My son is eleven. He can identify about nine kinds of bee, because of her. He also says right, that's interesting whenever something goes wrong, which was her line, word for word, and he has no idea it was hers. He thinks it is his. He will have it for the rest of his life and that seems to me like a reasonable definition of what we are all doing here.

She was ill for two years and told roughly four people. That was infuriating and it was also entirely her. She did not want a fuss, and she did not want anybody rearranging their week around her, and she told me off once for driving over with soup. She has got a fuss anyway, and I think she would have been quietly pleased by the turnout and very annoyed about the flowers.

Ruth, the garage still smells of smoke and wax. I am leaving it exactly like that.

Thank you, all of you, for being here.

How many ideas does one eulogy need?

Three. Four at the very most. A four minute eulogy is about 550 words at a normal reading pace of 140 words a minute, and three ideas at roughly 130 words each, plus an opening line and a closing line, fills that exactly with nothing left over.

The temptation is the opposite. You sit down with eleven memories and try to fit them all in, and what comes out moves too fast for anybody to hold one of them. Two ideas told properly beats seven mentioned. The arithmetic for other lengths is worked out speech by speech in how long a eulogy should be.

Pick the three that are most specific, not the three that are most important. Importance is invisible to a room. Specificity is not. If you have your three and the sentences still will not come, the eulogy writer will take a few answers and put a full draft on the page for you to argue with, free to read first.

Ideas that sound good on paper and land badly in the room

Four ideas to leave out, with what they turn into when you write them down and what to do instead.

The full chronology. Born here, moved there, married in 1968, two children, retired in 2004.

Weak: She was born in Leeds in 1941, the youngest of four, and moved to Nottingham when she was nine.

Better: She was the youngest of four and she never once in eighty-four years let anybody forget it.

The adjective with nothing under it. Kind, strong, generous, always there. Every family says these about every person, so they carry no information at all.

Weak: Mum was the kindest, most generous person you could ever hope to meet.

Better: Mum kept a spare tenner folded in the biscuit tin for anybody who turned up short, and she never asked for it back and never mentioned it again.

The inside joke with no door in it. If four people laugh and ninety do not, the room goes cold. Either explain it in one short line or save it for the wake.

Weak: And of course we all remember the thing with the caravan.

Better: In 1997 he reversed a caravan into a canal. Not near a canal. Into one. Some of you were there and I can see you have not forgotten either.

The sentence that tells the room how to feel. Lines like this is such a beautiful way to remember her do the opposite of what they intend. Give people the detail and let them arrive on their own.

Weak: It is so moving to think of all the lives she touched.

Better: There are about two hundred people in here on a Wednesday afternoon in November. She would have counted.

Where to find the ideas when your memory has gone blank

Ask other people narrow questions, not wide ones. Nobody can answer tell me about Dad. Almost everybody can answer what did he always say when he answered the phone.

Seven questions that reliably produce usable material:

1. What did they always say, word for word?
2. What did they always have on them or in the car?
3. What did they do every week that nobody thanked them for?
4. What did they teach you how to do?
5. What were they funny about without meaning to be?
6. What was the first thing they did when they came in the door?
7. What is a thing about them that would surprise the rest of us?

Then look in the physical places, because they remember better than you do right now. Their phone's camera roll, usually the richest source in the house. The glovebox. The fridge door. The shed. The family group chat, scrolled back a year. The form the funeral director asked somebody to fill in.

Write everything down badly and in any order first. Choosing is much easier once there are twelve things on a page to choose between. The full inventory of what belongs in the finished speech is in what to include in a eulogy and what to leave out, and the technique for turning a general idea into a specific line is in how to make a eulogy personal.

Common questions about eulogy ideas

What to include in a good eulogy?

Three specific things about the person, one short sentence saying who you are to them, and an ending. That is a complete eulogy. The specific things can be an object, a phrase they repeated, a habit, a kindness, something they taught somebody. Dates, addresses and job titles are optional and usually better left to the order of service.

What are the three main points of a eulogy?

Who they were to you, what they were actually like, and what stays behind now. Most working eulogies answer those three in that order. You can hang any of the sixteen ideas above onto the middle one, which is the part people struggle with, and it is also the part the room came to hear.

What is a good example of a eulogy?

A good example is one built from two or three specific details and nothing else, like the two speeches above. Both run about 450 words, which is roughly four minutes read aloud. Neither mentions a date of birth, a school, or a job title, and both are stronger for it.

What is the best opening line for a eulogy?

The best opening is one concrete detail, said plainly, before you introduce yourself. The tape measure in his pocket. The chair in the front window. Starting with a detail rather than thank you all for coming puts the person in the room in the first eight seconds. There are more openings worked out in full in how to start a eulogy without freezing at the first line.

What are some of the best eulogies?

The famous published ones are not much use as models, because they were written for public figures by professional speakers and they do not sound like anybody's family. The eulogies that work in an ordinary crematorium on an ordinary Tuesday are short, specific and slightly funny in one place. Borrow the shape from the two above rather than from anything famous.

One more thing before you start writing

You do not need a theme and you do not need to sum anybody up. You need three true things and the nerve to say them plainly, and you already have the three. They are in the glovebox and on the fridge and in whatever phrase you can still hear them saying.

If the sentences will not come tonight, there is a tool that will put a first draft on the page from a few answers about them, free to read before you decide anything. Edit it until it sounds like you. That is all anybody in that room is hoping for.