Simple Eulogy Examples Written in Plain Words

A simple eulogy uses plain, short sentences and concrete details instead of literary language, and usually runs 500 to 700 words. Simple does not mean short, and it does not mean thin. The five complete eulogies below are written the way people actually talk. You can put your own names and details into any of them.

Almost every page you will find for this search gives you eulogy examples sorted by who died. A mother one, a father one, a friend one. That is not what you asked for. You asked for a simple one, because you are not a writer and you do not want to stand up on Saturday sounding like someone reading a greeting card.

Here is the thing worth knowing before you start. Simple is about the words, not the length. A simple eulogy can run four minutes and cover sixty years. What makes it simple is that every sentence says one thing, the nouns are specific, and nothing in it is reaching for an effect.

The five below are complete. Read them, pick the one closest to your situation, and swap your details in.

Five simple eulogies you can use tonight

1. For a father, in the plainest words you have

Nothing in this one is clever. It is a son naming objects and habits, and it works because of that.

My name is Dan. Ray was my dad.

I want to start with his hands. They were cracked at the knuckles, winter and summer, because he would not wear gloves. He thought gloves were for people who did not know how to hold things.

He worked at the plant for thirty one years. He left the house at ten past five every morning. I know that because I could hear the screen door, then the truck, and then I would go back to sleep.

He was not a talker. If you asked him how he was, he said fine. If you asked again, he said he already told you. But he showed up. He came to every one of my games and he stood at the far end of the fence by himself and he never shouted anything. Afterwards in the truck he said one thing about the game. Just one. You hit that ball well. Or, you were slow out of the blocks today. I thought about those sentences for days.

He kept a coffee can of screws on the shelf above his bench. Thousands of them, every size. If you needed one he would go out there and find the right one in about four seconds, and he could not explain how, because he did not know how. He just knew the can.

He taught me to change a tire in the dark. He taught me to apologise, which he was bad at, and did anyway, which is the harder part. He taught me that you finish a job on the day you start it, a rule he kept to even when it was ten at night and the rest of us had gone to bed.

He was not sentimental about anything except the dog. The dog was allowed on the furniture and in the truck. When the dog died he dug the hole himself in February, in frozen ground, and it took him most of a day, and he would not let any of us help.

When Mum got ill he learned to cook four meals. Not five. Four. He made them in rotation for six years. He never complained about it once and he never let her see him cry about it, though I did, in the garage, more than once.

He died on Tuesday morning at home, which is what he wanted.

I have been trying to think of a good way to finish this. He would hate a good way to finish this. So I will say the true thing instead. He was steady. He got up early. He fixed what was broken. He loved my mother for forty four years and he loved us without saying it much.

Dad, I hit that ball well because you were standing at the fence. Thank you.

2. The six sentence eulogy, when that is all you can manage

Some people cannot get through four minutes and should not try. Six sentences, read slowly, is a complete eulogy. Nobody in that room will think it was too short.

I am Priya. Asha was my sister, she was two years older than me, and she spent all forty three of those years being the one who went first.

She taught me to swim by walking into the sea ahead of me and not looking back, which is how she did most things.

She was the one who called on birthdays, and she called early, usually around seven in the morning, because she could never wait.

She was ill for eleven months and she was still the funniest person in the room for ten of them.

I do not have anything wise to say about any of this, and I am not going to pretend I do.

I just loved her, and I am going to miss the phone ringing at seven in the morning.

3. For someone funny, with one laugh in it

Plain words are not the same as solemn words. This one has a joke in the middle and then goes quiet, and the plainness is what lets the joke land without feeling like a performance.

Good afternoon. I am Michael. Tom was my friend for twenty six years.

We met because we were assigned the same desk at a company neither of us liked. He immediately moved my chair, and then told me he had not touched my chair. We were both twenty three. I went home that evening and told my girlfriend I had met the most annoying man in England, and I was at his wedding fourteen months later.

Tom was a terrible driver. I want that in the record. He had strong opinions about other people's driving, which he would deliver while drifting out of his own lane. He once reversed into a skip at a garden centre and then argued with the skip's owner about who had right of way in a car park. He lost that argument. He told the story for eleven years and in his version he won it.

He was also the person you rang at two in the morning. I did it twice. Both times he answered on the second ring and both times he was in his car within ten minutes, driving badly, to come and get me. He never once asked what it was about on the phone. He asked when we got there.

He was good with his hands and bad with money. He gave away tools he needed and then borrowed them back. He turned up to help you move house with a van, no plan and three bags of crisps, and somehow it always worked out by about four in the afternoon.

He fitted kitchens for twenty years and he was proud of that, though he would not have used the word. He could look at a room and tell you what it needed. People asked for him by name and waited months rather than take someone else.

His daughters are here and I want to say this to you directly. Your dad talked about you constantly. Not in a proud father way, in a specific way. He knew what you were working on. He knew the names of your friends. He had your drawings in the van, taped to the inside of the door, long after you had both stopped drawing.

He read one book a year, always on holiday, always a thriller, and he would tell you the plot of it in full detail whether you had asked or not. He could not sit through a film. He fell asleep in every single one and then argued about the ending.

He died on the fourteenth. It was fast and it was not fair and there is nothing to be made of that.

Tom, I am going to keep telling the skip story. I am going to tell it your way.

4. For a mother when the relationship was hard

Plain words are the ones to use when you cannot honestly say the warm thing. Fancy language in a complicated eulogy sounds like covering something up. This one does not cover anything up and it is not cruel either.

I am Claire. Val was my mother.

I want to be careful here, because some of you knew her well and some of you knew her a little, and those are different people you knew.

She was born in 1951 in a house with no heating upstairs. She left school at fifteen and went into the shop, and she stayed in that trade her whole working life, and she was good at it. She could price a room of stock in an afternoon. She knew what things were worth and she was almost never wrong. People trusted her with money, and they were right to.

She was harder to live with than she was to work with. We did not speak for most of my thirties. I am not going to explain that today, because it is not the day for it, and because the explanation belongs to both of us and only one of us is here to give her half of it.

I will say one thing about my childhood that is neither a complaint nor a tribute. She took me to work with me in the school holidays from the age of about eight, and I sat behind the counter and learned how to talk to strangers. I have used that every day of my adult life. She never knew that, because I never told her.

We started speaking again four years ago, on the phone, on Sundays. Short calls. We talked about the weather and her hip and my children. Neither of us ever mentioned the years in the middle. For a long time I thought that was a failure. I have come to think it was the only way either of us could have done it.

She was funny on those calls. I had forgotten that. Dry, and quick, and a bit unkind about people on television.

She was at her best with my son. Whatever she could not do with me she could do with him. She was patient with him. She let him win at cards and pretended not to. That was a real thing and I am glad he had it.

She kept every birthday card she was ever sent, in a biscuit tin, in order. We found it last week. Mine were in there too, including the ones from the years we were not speaking, which I had forgotten I sent.

She died on the ninth, in hospital, and I was there, and she knew I was there.

I do not have a tidy ending. She was my mother. It was complicated, and we got four years back at the end, and I am glad we took them.

5. For a long life, without the grand summary

Ninety years is where people reach for a big closing sentence about a life well lived. This one does not. It stays on specifics the whole way and is stronger for it.

Good morning. My name is Ellen and Jim was my grandfather.

He was ninety one. I am not going to try to sum that up, because you cannot, and anything I said would be too small.

So here are some things instead.

He was an electrician for forty six years. He could tell you what was wrong with a house by standing in the hall. He did the wiring in this church in 1974 and he would have wanted someone to mention that, so I am mentioning it. He did his national service first, in Cyprus, and he talked about it exactly twice that I know of, both times about the food.

He married Joan in 1958 and she died in 2009. He did not remarry and he did not become sad about it in a way you could see. He kept her handwriting on the inside of the kitchen cupboard door, a shopping list, four items, and he would not let anyone paint over it.

He grew dahlias badly for fifty years. Every single year he said next year would be the year. It never was. He kept at it anyway, which tells you most of what you need to know about him.

He had four children, eleven grandchildren and nine great grandchildren, and he knew all our names and all our birthdays and he never once used the wrong one. He kept them written in the back of a diary he replaced every January, copying the whole list out again by hand.

He drove until he was eighty eight, and he stopped by himself, before anyone asked him to, because he said he had noticed he was slower. That took a kind of courage I do not think I have.

The last two years were small. A chair, the radio, the garden through the window. He did not complain about that either. When I visited he asked about my work and he remembered the answer from the time before. He always asked me to put the kettle on even when he did not want tea, because it got me into the kitchen where he could hear me moving about.

He gave every one of us a torch when we turned eighteen. A proper heavy one, with spare batteries taped to the handle. I thought it was a strange present at the time. I have moved house five times and I still know exactly where mine is.

He died at home on the second of the month, in the afternoon, with the back door open.

Grandad, the dahlias are still rubbish. I will keep planting them.

What makes a eulogy simple instead of just short?

A simple eulogy is one where every sentence carries a single idea and the nouns are specific. Length has nothing to do with it. Example five above is a long eulogy about a ninety one year life, and it is simple, because it never once reaches for a phrase bigger than the thing it is describing.

Four things make the difference in practice:

• One idea per sentence. If you need a comma to hold two thoughts together, make it two sentences and read them slower.
• Specific nouns. Not "he was generous". A coffee can of screws. A shopping list on a cupboard door. The specific thing does the work the adjective was trying to do.
• Say died. The plain word is steadier to say out loud and nobody in the room needs protecting from it.
• No instructions to the room. Leave out "she would have loved to see you all here". Those are lines people write when they have run out of specifics.

If what you want is something warmer than these, the five in heartfelt eulogy examples for five very different people are written in a fuller register. If you have the specifics but no time, the eulogy writer will put a complete first draft on the page from a few answers about them, free to read before you decide anything.

The six sentences a simple eulogy needs

A simple eulogy needs six things in this order, and each one can be a single sentence if that is all you have. Write the six, then stop.

1. Who you are. "I am Dan. Ray was my dad." Nine words. Do not do more here.
2. One specific thing about them, immediately. The hands. The calls at seven. Start on a detail, not on a statement about loss.
3. What they did with their time. Work, a trade, raising people, a garden. Facts and numbers are good here.
4. One story, told short. Not the best story you have. The clearest one. Four sentences is plenty.
5. The true sentence about them. One line you would still agree with in ten years.
6. A direct word to them. Turn and speak to the person, by name, in one sentence. That is what people remember.

At a normal speaking pace of about 140 words a minute, six well filled sentences and a short story come out at roughly 500 to 700 words, which is three and a half to five minutes. That is the right length for almost every funeral.

How to put your own details into any of these

Take whichever example is closest and work through it once with a pen. Cross out every name and number and write yours in. Then do a second pass and cross out anything that is not true about your person, even if it sounds good. That second pass is where most of the writing actually happens.

Then find your version of the coffee can. Every example above turns on one small concrete object or habit, and that is not an accident. If you are stuck finding yours, three details that make a eulogy personal walks through how to get at those specifics when your mind has gone blank, which it will have.

Read the finished thing out loud once, standing up. Any sentence you stumble on is too long, and the fix is to cut it in half rather than smooth it out. If there is a line you know you cannot get through, give that paragraph to someone else and say so at the start.

Questions people ask about simple eulogies

What is a good eulogy example?

A good eulogy example is one with complete sentences you could actually say out loud, not a list of tips. The five above are full speeches in different registers: a plain one for a father, a six sentence one, a funny one, one for a difficult relationship, and one for a long life. Pick on register rather than on who died, then swap your details in.

What are some good examples of short eulogies?

Example two above is a complete six sentence eulogy, about 130 words, which reads in under a minute. That is a real eulogy and it is enough. If you need several options at that length, short eulogy examples you can read in under three minutes has more of them with word counts attached.

What is the best opening line for a eulogy?

The best opening line is one specific fact about the person, said flat. "I want to start with his hands." "She taught me to swim by walking into the sea ahead of me." Open on a detail, never on a statement about grief or about how hard it is to find words. The room already knows both of those things.

What are the best words to start a eulogy?

Start with your name and your relationship to them, in that order, in about nine words: "My name is Dan. Ray was my dad." Say it slowly, because it will be the first time you hear your own voice in that room. Skip "on behalf of the family" unless you have actually been asked to speak for them.

What are the 7 steps to writing an eulogy?

Most seven step guides are a longer version of the six above: who you are, one specific detail, what they did, one short story, the true sentence, and a direct word to them. The step they add is reading it aloud and timing it, which is worth doing and is the one people skip.

Pick the example closest to yours and start crossing things out. Plain words said steadily are what people remember, and you already have the specifics you need, because you knew them and nobody else in that room knew them in quite the same way. If the page is still blank in an hour, the eulogy writer is there to get a first draft down so you have something to edit instead.