How to Write Your Own Eulogy in Advance: Six Decisions

You can write your own eulogy in advance, and the practical version takes six decisions: perspective, reader, content, length, storage, and a review date. Most pages about this treat it as a life exercise. This one treats it as a document that somebody will stand up and read out loud at your funeral.

Two different people search this. One wants a thinking exercise: write the eulogy you would want, then go and live so that it becomes true. That is a real exercise and plenty of pages cover it well.

The other person is doing paperwork. They are putting their affairs in order, maybe after a diagnosis, maybe because they turned seventy and they are a practical sort, and they want to write the words that get read at the service so that nobody has to guess. Almost nothing online is written for that person.

This page is. It assumes you want a finished document, in a folder, that a named person can pick up and read. The six decisions below are in the order you have to make them, and each one has the actual words underneath it.

Which of the two eulogies are you writing?

If nobody will ever read it out loud, you are writing the reflective version, and you can ignore most of what follows. If somebody will read it at a service, you are writing a document with a job to do, and the job changes what goes in it.

The difference shows up fast. A reflective eulogy can say "I hope I was generous." A eulogy that gets read aloud cannot, because a room full of people who knew you will hear a hope and take it for a claim. The spoken version has to work for the people sitting there, in the order they hear it, read by somebody whose voice may not hold.

One more thing separates them. The reflective one is finished when you stop writing. The spoken one is finished when the right person has a copy and knows what it is.

The six decisions, and the words that go with each

1. First person, third person, or both

Third person is easier to read aloud, first person lands harder, and a hybrid gets most of both. Decide before you write a sentence, because it changes every line after it.

Here is the same opening in all three, so you can hear the difference:

Third person: "Margaret wrote this herself, about four years before she died. She wanted me to tell you that she timed it, and that it is four minutes."

First person: "I wrote this myself, about four years ago. If it has held up, good. If it has not, you will all be kind about it, which was always the problem with you lot."

Hybrid: "Margaret wrote this herself and asked me to read it. I will do that, and then she has four lines at the end that she wanted said in her own voice."

First person is the harder one to deliver. The reader stands there speaking as you, in the present tense, to people who are grieving you, and some people cannot do it. If you want first person, ask the reader before you commit to it rather than after.

2. Name the reader, and ask them out loud

Choose one person, ask them while you are well, and name a second in case the first cannot do it on the day. An unasked reader is the most common way a self-written eulogy fails.

The ask is short. You are not really asking a favour, you are giving a warning:

"I have written something for my funeral. It runs about five minutes. I would like you to read it, and I would rather ask you now than leave it in a drawer for you to find. You can say no. If you do I will ask David, and I will not be offended."

Pick for steadiness, not for closeness. The person who loved you most is often the person least able to get through it. A nephew, a colleague, a friend of forty years who is not immediate family: all steadier bets than a spouse or a child. If you want your child to read it anyway, say so, and name the backup in the same breath. If your family is likely to have views about who speaks at all, who gives the eulogy at a funeral covers how that usually gets settled.

3. Decide what you are allowed to say

Write the two or three things only you know, and cut anything that lands on a living person. You have a freedom nobody else speaking that day has, and one hard limit.

The freedom is that you can say the thing a family member would never risk saying. The limit is that you will not be in the room to manage what you started. A score settled from the lectern cannot be answered.

Too far: "I never forgave my brother for what he did in 1994."

Usable: "My brother and I lost about ten years. We got some of them back. If you are sitting on something like that, do not take as long as we did."

Too far: "Claire knows what she did."

Usable: "I was not easy to live with. Claire stayed anyway, and I wanted that said out loud while everybody was listening."

Too far: "I always wished Daniel had made more of himself."

Usable: "Daniel took the harder road and never once asked me to make it easier. I noticed. I should have said so."

Too far: "I have left the house to Rachel and I know some of you will have opinions about that."

Usable: "Whatever has been arranged on paper was arranged by me, on purpose, while I was perfectly able to think. Nobody in this room talked me into anything, and that is the last I want said about it."

The test is quick. Read the line back and ask who in the room has to sit still through it. If the answer is one named person, either cut it or turn it toward them instead of at them. The ordinary rules still apply on top of that, and what to include in a eulogy covers the rest.

4. Fix the length before you write, not after

Aim for 500 to 700 words, which runs about four to five minutes at a funeral reading pace of roughly 140 words a minute. Self-written eulogies run long, because nobody is editing them for you.

Write to a number from the first line. The numbers that work:

• 300 words, about two minutes. A short, plain statement. The right choice when other people are also speaking.
• 500 words, about three and a half minutes. The usual answer. Long enough for three specifics and a close.
• 700 words, about five minutes. The most a room will take from a document, and only if it stays specific the whole way through.
• Over 900 words. Somebody will cut it on the day, and they will cut badly, because they will be guessing at what you would have dropped.

If you want to see the same content written at several lengths, how long should a eulogy be has the word counts against the clock.

5. Put it where it will actually be found

Keep a printed copy with your will or your funeral instructions, give the reader their own copy, and write a cover note on the front page so that anyone who finds it knows what they are holding. A file on a laptop nobody can unlock is the same as no eulogy at all.

The cover note does most of the work. Put it at the top of page one:

"This is the eulogy I wrote for my own funeral. Written March 2026. Ruth Adeyemi has agreed to read it. If Ruth cannot, David Okonjo has a copy and has also agreed. Please do not rewrite it. You can cut the last paragraph if the service is running short, and you can stop at any point and hand it to Ruth."

That permission clause matters more than it looks. It is the thing a grieving family will not take for themselves. Without it, somebody stands in a vestry at nine in the morning wondering whether they are allowed to shorten their mother's last words, and decides not to risk it, and then the service overruns.

6. Date it, and set a time to look again

Date the draft and plan to reread it every two or three years, and after anything that changes who is in the room. A eulogy that names a partner you have since separated from, or that leaves out a grandchild born after you wrote it, causes a very specific kind of pain.

The events that should send you back to it: a birth, a death, a marriage, a separation, a move, an estrangement, a reconciliation, or a reader who has become too frail or too close to read it. Four of those six are good news, which is worth saying, because the review is not a morbid exercise. It is the same reason you update a will.

Put the dates on the page itself, at the bottom, so that the next person to open the folder can see the document is current:

"Written March 2026. Reviewed March 2029. Next read due 2032. Reader confirmed with Ruth, March 2029."

Four complete eulogies, written by the person being eulogised

Each one of these is complete and stands on its own. They differ in perspective, length and register, so read them for shape rather than content, then put your own life into the one that fits.

1. A long life, third person, read by an adult child (462 words)

Margaret wrote this herself, three years ago, and asked me to read it exactly as it is. She also asked me to tell you that she timed it, and that it is four minutes, so you can all relax.

She was born in Gateshead in 1945, fourth of six, in a house with one bathroom and a coal fire that was somebody's job every morning. She said the job was always hers.

She trained as a midwife at twenty and delivered babies for thirty-eight years. She stopped counting somewhere past four thousand. She used to say she had been the first person to hold a fair number of the people in this room, and that she could still tell you which of them had been difficult about it.

She married Ted in 1968. They had forty-one years, two daughters, one genuinely terrible caravan, and a disagreement about the right way to prune an apple tree that was never settled by either of them. Ted died in 2009. She did not remarry and she did not pretend she was fine about it. She said the first two years were awful and the rest was manageable, and she got irritated when people called her brave for simply carrying on.

What she wanted said about her character, in her own words: she was practical, she was often sharp, and she was reliable. She wrote that she would rather be remembered as reliable than as kind, because kind is easy for an afternoon, and reliable is forty years of Sunday phone calls that she made whether or not she felt like it.

She was proud of three things and she listed them in this order. The garden. The two of us, and the four grandchildren after us. And the fact that she learned to swim at sixty-three, because she was embarrassed not to be able to, and she disliked being embarrassed more than she disliked cold water.

She has left instructions about the garden. I am not going to read them out. They run to two pages and include a diagram, and Alan has already said he will take the roses.

One thing she asked me to put in that I would not have thought of. She wanted it on the record that she was not religious, that she had no complaint at all about anybody here who is, and that she was glad the vicar had been so decent about the whole arrangement.

And then she asked me to finish with this. She wrote: do not make me into a lesson. If you want to do something for me, ring somebody who is on their own this week. That is the whole of it. And then, underlined twice: that is enough now, Jen. Sit down.

2. First person, written after a diagnosis, read by a friend (441 words)

Before I start, you should know that Peter wrote this himself, in May. I am reading it, but the words are his, and he was very clear that I was not to improve them.

So. I wrote this about seven weeks after they told me, which is earlier than most people would, and I did it then because I wanted to do it while I could still be funny about it. I am fifty-four. I would have liked more and I am not going to pretend otherwise, but I had a good run and I know a lot of people who got less.

I want to say what I actually did, because the official version is thin. I taught Year 6 for twenty-six years in the same school. I estimate seven hundred and eighty children. I know for a fact that I was not the best teacher in that building. I was the one who noticed the quiet ones, and I will take that.

Three people in particular. Nadia, I married you knowing you were cleverer than me and I never once minded. You have had a hard eighteen months and you did it without complaining in front of me, which I noticed, and which I want everyone here to know about. Sam, you are nineteen and you have had to be the adult in the house this year. That was not fair and you did it anyway. Jo, you drove me to every single appointment and you never once filled the silence with something hopeful. Thank you for that. You have no idea how rare it is.

Things I would say to you if I could say one thing each. To my sister: ring Mum more than you think you need to. To my brother: the money does not matter, let it go. To the people I taught: I remember you, including the ones who think I would not.

I am not going to tell you how to feel about this. You will feel what you feel and some of you will be fine by Thursday and some of you will not be fine for a long time, and both of those are allowed.

One request. Nadia will be surrounded for about three weeks and then the phone will stop. Be the person who rings in March. That is the whole ask.

Right. Jo is going to sit down now, and somebody is going to say something kind about me that I would have argued with, and then there are sandwiches. Go and talk to somebody you have not seen in years. That is the point of the whole thing.

3. Hybrid, dry and practical, for someone who disliked a fuss (300 words)

Alan wrote the first part of this about himself, and the last part as himself, and he left a note telling me where the join is.

Alan Price was a structural engineer for forty-one years. He checked things other people had designed and told them what would fall down. He was right most of the time and he was not gracious about it.

He was married to Susan for thirty-six years. He described their marriage, in this document, as "steady, well-maintained, and inspected annually whether she liked it or not."

He had one child, Tom, and two granddaughters. He taught both girls to use a spirit level before they could read. He thought this was a normal thing to do.

He was not warm and he knew it. He wrote that he was not going to claim otherwise now that he could not be contradicted. What he offered instead was that in forty-one years he never once missed a deadline, never once sent anybody a bill they were not expecting, and never once let Susan find out from somebody else that something had gone wrong.

And then he wrote this, and asked me to read it in the first person, and said I should pause before it so you all knew the voice had changed.

I have been to a lot of funerals where somebody stood up and made the dead man kinder than he was. Do not do that to me. I was difficult, I was often late to understand things that mattered to the people I lived with, and I was lucky in Susan beyond anything I earned.

Keep the service short. Check the guttering on the back of the house before winter. And be good to Susan, who has put up with a great deal, mostly me.

4. Six sentences, for someone who wanted almost nothing said (136 words)

Joan wrote six sentences and asked that nothing be added to them.

She said: I was born in Cork in 1939 and I have lived in this town since I was twenty-two, and that is most of what there is to say about where I was.

I worked in the library for thirty years and I liked it, and if you ever took a book out between 1968 and 1998 I probably stamped it.

I had no children and I was not sad about it, whatever people assumed, and I had friends instead, which turned out to be plenty.

I do not want a long service and I do not want anybody standing up here listing my qualities.

Go home, have your tea, and put the kettle on for somebody else while you are at it.

What the reader needs from you before the day

Give the reader four things: the document itself, a date, permission to cut, and the one sentence they open with. Almost everything that goes wrong on the day is something the reader was never told.

The opening sentence is the one people forget. The room does not know yet that you wrote it, and a reader who launches straight into the third person about themselves will confuse everybody for a paragraph. Hand them the line:

"Before I start, you should know that Peter wrote this himself. I am reading it, but the words are his."

Then tell them, in writing, that they are allowed to stop. A reader carrying somebody else's last words feels a duty to finish that a normal speaker does not feel, and that is exactly the pressure that makes a voice go. Name the backup, and say out loud that handing over is not a failure. If your reader is worried about this, what if I break down during a eulogy is the page to give them, and it is written for exactly this.

Practical last things. Print it at fourteen point or larger, one side of the paper only, and number the pages, because a reader whose hands are shaking will not find their place on a double-sided sheet. Put a blank line between paragraphs so the eye can land. Do not staple it.

Common questions

Can you write your own eulogy?

Yes, and nothing stops it being read at your funeral. There is no rule, religious or legal, against it. The only real requirements are practical: somebody has to agree in advance to read it, and somebody has to know where it is. Most funeral directors have handled one before and will not find the request unusual.

Can you provide an example of a eulogy I can write for myself?

The four above are complete and adaptable. Start with the one whose register sounds like you, replace the specifics, and keep the proportions: two or three concrete things you did, one honest admission, one direct address to a named person, and a close that asks the room to do something small. If you would rather start from a draft than a blank page, our eulogy writer asks a few questions and shows you a preview before you pay anything.

Does a eulogy have to be about a dead person?

No. A eulogy is a speech of praise, and the word is used for retirements, leaving parties and living tributes as often as for funerals. That is why a self-written one is not a contradiction. You are writing a tribute that happens to be about you, to be read at a point when you are not available to deliver it.

What should you not put in a eulogy?

Leave out anything that settles a score with somebody who will be in the room, detailed medical history, money, and the will. Also leave out instructions about how the room should feel. Writing your own gives you one extra thing to avoid: do not inventory your own virtues. Say what you did and let the room draw its own conclusions.

How to write a self-eulogy?

Make the six decisions in order: perspective, reader, content, length, storage, review date. Then write to 500 words, read it aloud once with a stopwatch, and cut whatever you stumbled over. The reading aloud is the step people skip, and it is the one that finds the sentences nobody can say.

Most of this is not writing at all. It is one conversation with the person who will read it, and a note on the front page so that nobody has to guess what they are holding.

Write the draft badly this week and fix it in two years. A dated, imperfect page in a folder is worth more than the perfect one you never got to, and the people you leave it for will not be grading it. If a blank page is what is stopping you, you can see a draft before paying anything and then make it sound like you.