One Page Eulogy Template: 450 Words, Four Full Speeches

A one page eulogy is 450 to 500 words, which takes about three and a half minutes to read aloud. That fits on one side of a sheet set in 12 or 13 point type with 1.4 line spacing and three quarter inch margins. Set the same page in 16 point double spaced and only about 250 words will fit.

You have either been asked to keep it short or you decided that yourself, and now you want a template that lands on one page instead of three.

The problem with most eulogy templates is that they are not sized to anything. They hand you six sections and no word counts, so you fill them in honestly, end up with 900 words, and find yourself cutting at midnight.

This page does it the other way round. The word budget first, then the blank template with a number on every line, then four complete eulogies that each fit on one sheet. Copy whichever one is closest to your person and write over it.

How many words fit on one page?

About 450 to 500 words fit on one side of a letter or A4 sheet at a size you can still read from a lectern. The exact number depends entirely on how you set the page, which is why "one page" on its own is not a length.

• 12 point, single spaced, 1 inch margins: about 520 words. Fine at a desk, hard at a lectern.
• 13 point, 1.4 line spacing, 0.75 inch margins: about 470 words. This is the setting to use.
• 14 point, 1.5 line spacing, 1 inch margins: about 380 words.
• 16 point, double spaced, 1 inch margins: about 250 words.

People read at roughly 140 words a minute at a funeral, slower than normal speech because of the pauses. So 470 words is about three minutes twenty seconds, and 250 words is about one minute fifty. Both are respectable lengths. Three to five minutes is the standard ask, and if you want the full breakdown by service type there is a longer piece on how long a eulogy should be and what each length looks like.

Pick your setting before you write, not after. If you know you want 16 point because your eyes will be wet, you are writing a 250 word speech and you should know that at the start.

The one page eulogy template, with a word count on every line

Here is the template. Every line carries its own word budget, and the budgets add up to between 355 and 500 words, so the top of each band fills the page and the bottom of each band leaves you a margin.

Who you are. 25 to 35 words.
Good morning. My name is [your name] and [name] was my [relationship]. Thank you all for being here.

One sentence that names them. 20 to 30 words.
If you only remember one thing about [name], make it this: [the single truest thing about them, in plain words].

The first specific detail. 70 to 90 words.
[One habit, object or place that was theirs alone. The thing a stranger could not guess. Not a quality, a thing.]

One story, told once. 110 to 140 words.
[A single scene. Where you were, what they did, what was said. One afternoon, not one decade.]

A second detail, shorter. 60 to 80 words.
[A second habit or a line they always used, so the first detail does not look like a one off.]

What they leave behind. 50 to 70 words.
[What people now do differently because of them. Name a person if you can.]

The last line. 20 to 30 words.
[Speak to the room or speak to them. One sentence. Then stop.]

Notice what is not in there. No birth date, no list of schools, no career summary, no thank you list. Those four things eat a page and give the room nothing.

If you want the same shape in a longer version, with each slot filled in three different ways, the fill in the blank eulogy template carries that slot by slot. This page is the one page cut of it.

Four one page eulogies, written out in full

Each of these is between 440 and 470 words. Each one has been read aloud and timed at a funeral pace, and each one fits on a single sheet at 13 point. They are deliberately different in register, so take the one closest to your person rather than the one closest to the top.

1. For a father, plain and steady

No jokes, no build up, one Sunday afternoon doing the work.

Good morning. My name is Danny and Ray Whelan was my father. Thank you all for being here.

If you only remember one thing about my dad, make it this. He fixed things, he fixed them properly, and he never told you he had done it.

He kept a coffee tin of screws in the garage, sorted by size into smaller tins inside it. Forty years of screws. When a hinge went on a cupboard door he did not go to the shop, he went to the tin. He always came back with the right one, and with a look on his face like he had got away with something. He could not walk past a wobbling chair without turning it upside down.

The thing I keep coming back to is a Sunday in February, about twelve years ago. My car had died on the ring road and I rang him from a petrol station, thirty one years old and embarrassed about it. He did not say a word about that. He drove out with a toolbox and a flask, lay on the wet tarmac for forty minutes, then stood up, handed me the flask and said, right, follow me home, stay in third. We drove back at thirty miles an hour the whole way with his hazards on. He never mentioned it again. Not at Christmas, not as a joke, not once.

He was not a talker. On a good phone call he managed about forty words and most of them were about the car. But he turned up. He stood at the far corner flag at every one of my son's football matches for six seasons, on his own, with a flask, and he never once shouted anything at the referee.

The other thing you should know about him is his handwriting. Every appliance in that house has a small label on the back of it in capitals, with the date he fitted it and what fuse it takes. My mother found twenty three of them last week. He was not being tidy. He was leaving instructions for whoever came after him, and it turns out that is us.

What he leaves behind is a family of people who try the repair first. My sister rewired her own kitchen in the spring. My son is fifteen and he knows what a washer is for and why you keep the old one in the drawer. My mother has not had to call anybody out to that house in thirty years, and she is slightly worried about that now.

Dad, the hinge on the back door has started sticking again. I will get to it this weekend. Thank you for everything.

2. For a mother, with one laugh in it

One warm thing and one ridiculous thing, and the ridiculous thing lands in the middle rather than at the end.

Good afternoon. For those who do not know me, I am Priya, and Sheila was my mother.

My mother was the most generous person I have known, and she was absolutely impossible in a car park.

The generous part is the part you all saw. She fed people. If you came to that house between 1985 and last March you were fed, whether you were hungry or not, whether you were family or the man reading the gas meter. She kept a second freezer in the garage for other people's emergencies. When Aunty Meena was in hospital for six weeks, my mother cooked for her husband every night of it and told nobody, and we only found out because he said thank you to her at a wedding two years later.

She did it without any announcement. There was no rota and no spreadsheet. Somebody would be ill and a container would appear on their step, and if you tried to give the container back she would act as though she had never seen it before in her life.

Now the car park. My mother believed, with her whole heart, that there was a better space. Not a space, a better one. She would drive past four empty bays to look at a row she could not see yet. She had a theory about which end of a row fills up first, and it was not correct. We once circled the hospital car park for twenty two minutes and I timed it. When I pointed at a space she said, that one is too close to the trolleys, and kept driving. The last time we went shopping together, in February, she parked in the first space she saw. I said, who are you. She said, I am tired, Priya. It was the first honest thing she had said about any of it. Then we sat and laughed in the car for a minute before we went in.

That is the part I did not expect about these last months. She got shorter with everyone, including her consultant, and much funnier.

What she leaves behind is in your kitchens. Half of you cook something because she taught you. My brother makes her dal badly and will not accept this. My daughter is nine and she puts a spare portion aside for whoever might turn up, and she has no idea where she got that from. There are four people in this room she cooked for every week for years, and I only learned two of their names on Tuesday.

Mum, I am going to park badly for the rest of my life in your honour. Thank you for feeding all of us.

3. For a grandmother who lived a long life and was ill at the end

Ninety four years, four of them hard. This one says so and then spends its page on the ninety.

My name is Tom and Margaret was my grandmother. On behalf of her three children and her nine grandchildren, thank you all for coming.

My grandmother was ninety four when she died, and the last four years of that were hard, and I am going to spend my page on the ninety that came before them.

She was a hospital cleaner for twenty six years and then a hospital receptionist for eleven more, in the same building, on the same corridor. She knew everybody. You could not walk through town with her. A fifteen minute errand took an hour because three people stopped her, and she remembered every one of their mothers by name.

Her house smelled of toast and furniture polish, and she had a chair by the window that nobody else sat in. There was a biscuit tin with a picture of Loch Lomond on the lid, and in my entire childhood it never once had biscuits in it. It had buttons, elastic bands, and a set of keys to a door she had not owned since 1979. If you asked her for a biscuit she produced one from somewhere else entirely, and I still do not understand where.

When I was about seven I broke a cup in that kitchen, one of the good ones with the gold rim. I started crying before she even got through the door. She picked up the pieces, put them in the bin, and said, well, now we have five. Then she made me toast. She did not tell my mother for eleven years, and when she finally did she told it as though it had been funny the whole time, which by then it was.

She wrote to me every week of my first year away, on blue airmail paper, about absolutely nothing. The weather, the neighbours, what the corridor was like now they had moved reception. I have forty one of them in a shoebox and I have read six of them since Thursday.

In the last two years she did not always know who I was. I dreaded those visits and I went anyway and I am glad I did. She would take my hand and pat it twice, which is what she did to every child who ever sat down next to her, and that part of her was still working right to the end.

What she leaves behind is a whole corridor of people who felt recognised by her, and nine grandchildren who each think they were the favourite. And a biscuit tin, which is going to my mother's house with the buttons still in it.

Gran, there are five cups, they are in the good cabinet, and we are using them today. Thank you.

4. For a friend, when four people are speaking and one page is the limit

Written to a hard cap, because the service has four speakers. It names the cap in the first thirty words and stops cleanly.

I am Ade. Chris and I met in 2004 on a building site in Croydon. There are four of us speaking today so I have one page, which he would have found very funny, because he could not finish a story in under ten minutes.

Chris was the most reliable unreliable man I have ever met. He was late to everything that did not matter and he was never once late for anything that did.

He missed my thirtieth. He turned up at the hospital at four in the morning when my daughter was born, with a car seat he had bought himself, because he had checked and he knew we did not have one. Nobody asked him to do that. He kept a mental list of the real things and he never got that list wrong.

He did the same for three other people in this room. Dean's roof. Marie's moving van. He never once framed any of it as a favour, he framed it as something he happened to be doing anyway, which is how he got away with it for twenty years.

The story I want to tell is a short one. In 2011 I lost my job and I did not tell anybody for three weeks. Chris rang me on a Tuesday and said, come and labour for me, cash in hand, start Monday, I am short. He was not short. He had told the lads to make room. I worked for him for five months, he never once let on that he knew, he never let me thank him, and he took the mickey out of my bricklaying every single day until I left. I have still not told anybody what those five months were.

He also talked far too much. I want to say that properly, because everybody is being careful today and he would hate that. He talked over you, he told the same three stories, and if you got him started on football you lost the afternoon. He had one story about a wheelbarrow that got longer every year until it had a crane in it. I would give a great deal to lose an afternoon.

What he leaves behind, for me, is a standard. There is a list of the real things and you turn up for them. Half the people in this room have been carried by him in some way they have not mentioned to the others, and you can see it in here today. His daughter Katie is eleven and she already does it. She notices who has gone quiet.

Chris, you have got four speakers and about twenty minutes. You would have wanted forty. Thank you, mate.

What to cut first when you are over one page

Cut the biography first. Dates, addresses, job titles and the names of schools are the easiest 150 words to lose and the least missed, because the room either already knows them or does not need them. Here is what each cut looks like on the page.

Cut the chronology.

Before: "She was born in Dundee in 1949, the third of five children, and moved to Leicester in 1967, where she trained as a nurse at the Royal Infirmary before marrying my father in 1972."

After: "She trained as a nurse at twenty and never really stopped being one."

Thirty four words down to twelve, and nothing anybody came to hear has gone.

Cut the second story. Two stories at 120 words each will not fit with everything else, and the second one almost always proves the same point as the first. Keep the one with a specific place in it. If both have a place, keep the one you can say out loud without stopping.

Cut the thank you list.

Before: "On behalf of the whole family I would like to thank the staff at Oakfield, Doctor Ramesh and the district nurses, Reverend Hollis for today's service, and everybody who sent cards and flowers."

After: "Thank you to everyone at Oakfield who looked after her."

The longer version belongs in the order of service or in a line from whoever is hosting, not in your 470 words.

Cut the lines that tell the room how to feel.

Before: "She was a truly beautiful soul, and her warmth touched the lives of everyone lucky enough to have known her."

After: nothing. Delete the sentence.

That sentence costs you twenty four words and could be about any person who has ever died. The coffee tin of screws could only be about one man. Spend the page on the tin.

Do not cut these three things: the one story, the specific detail, and the last line. If you are still over after the four cuts above, shorten the story rather than removing it, and take the words out of the middle. If the blank page is the actual problem rather than the length, you can answer a few questions and read a free draft before you decide anything, then cut it down to one page with the list above.

How to print the one page so you can read it under pressure

Print it on one side only, in 13 or 14 point, with 1.4 line spacing, and never let a sentence break across the bottom of the page. A single sheet means you never turn anything over, which is the point of writing to one page in the first place.

• One side, never two. If it runs to a second side, cut rather than print the back. Turning a page while your hands are shaking is how people lose their place.
• 13 or 14 point, bold is optional. Arial, Verdana or Georgia. Do not use a script font because it looks nicer on the table.
• Break the lines where you breathe. Put each sentence of the last line on its own line, even if it looks odd on paper.
• Mark two pause points with a slash. Usually after the naming sentence and before the last line. Those are the two places people stop being able to speak.
• Put your own name at the top. Not for you. For whoever picks the page up if you hand it over.
• Print two copies. One in your inside pocket, one with the person sitting beside you, who should know that they are the backup reader before the service starts.

Read it aloud standing up, with a timer, before you print the final copy. If a 470 word page comes in at four and a half minutes you are reading slowly, which is correct, and it leaves you no room for an unplanned pause. Cut forty words.

Questions people ask about the one page eulogy

What is a good format for a eulogy?

Who you are, one sentence naming them, one specific detail, one story, a second shorter detail, what they leave behind, and a last line. Seven parts, in that order, works for any relationship and fits on one page at 450 to 500 words. Chronological formats run long because a life has too many years in it.

How many words should a eulogy be?

Between 400 and 700 words for a three to five minute eulogy, at a funeral reading pace of about 140 words a minute. One page at a readable 13 point is roughly 470 of those words. Anything under 250 words will feel abrupt to a room unless you are one of several speakers.

Can you provide an example of a short eulogy?

Yes. "My name is Nina and Paul was my brother. He taught me to drive in a Vauxhall Astra and he never raised his voice once, which anybody who has taught a sixteen year old to drive will know is close to a miracle. He was patient with me when nobody else had the time. Thank you for being here for him." That is sixty two words and about twenty five seconds, and it is a complete and honourable eulogy. There are longer ones on the short eulogy examples page.

Is a 15 minute eulogy too long?

Yes, in almost every case. Fifteen minutes is about 2,100 words, and most crematorium slots are twenty to thirty minutes in total including music and committal. If you are the only speaker at a longer church service, eight minutes is the realistic ceiling. One page keeps you safely inside every slot you are likely to be given.

What is the best last line of a eulogy?

A short sentence spoken either to the room or to the person, with nothing after it. "Thank you for coming, and thank you for loving her." Or, speaking to them: "Dad, the hinge is sticking again. I will get to it." Twenty to thirty words, one idea, then stop and sit down. Do not add a summary after your last line.

One page is a kindness to yourself, not a compromise. Four hundred and seventy words of the specific, true things is more than most people manage in fifteen minutes, and you will be able to get through it. If you want something on the page to start cutting from, the preview is free to read. Otherwise take the template above, write over one of the four examples, and print it on one side.