What to Include in a Eulogy (And What to Leave Out)

A eulogy needs six things: who you are to the person who died, one sentence that says who they were, two or three specific stories, a detail only you would know, what they left behind in other people, and an ending that stops cleanly. Dates, schools and job titles are background. They are not the speech.

Most pages that answer this question hand you a list of facts. Date of birth. Where they went to school. How they met their spouse. Their nicknames. Read that list out loud at a funeral and you have an obituary with a person standing behind it.

The facts are not wrong, they are just not the point. Nobody in that room needs to be told where your mother was born. They need to hear what she was like to be around, from someone who was around her.

So this page is built the other way round. Six parts, in the order they go in, with the actual words written out for each one. Then the four things to leave out, which matters more than most guides admit. Then a full eulogy at the end with all six parts joined up, so you can see the shape rather than imagine it.

The six things every eulogy needs

A eulogy is not a biography and it is not a speech about grief. It is a short portrait of one person, delivered by someone who knew them, ending in a goodbye. These six parts are what that portrait is made of. A eulogy missing any one of them feels off, and usually the missing part is number four.

1. Who you are, and why you are the one speaking

Two or three sentences, right at the top. Say your name, say your relationship to the person who died, and stop. Half the room may not know who you are, and they spend the first minute working it out instead of listening.

Do not thank everyone for coming. That is the celebrant's job, and it costs you the opening of your speech. Do not apologise for being nervous either. Everyone already knows.

Three openings that do the whole job in under fifteen seconds:

My name is Sarah. Margaret was my mother. She would have hated a fuss like this, so I will try to keep it short and she can be annoyed about it later.

For those who do not know me, I am Tom, David's younger brother. There were four of us. He was the one who made sure the rest of us turned out all right.

I am Priya. I worked alongside Ken for nineteen years, which means I probably heard more of his opinions than his own family did.

If you are not sure how to get the first line down at all, we wrote a whole page on getting started when the page is still blank. Come back here once you have something.

2. One sentence that says who they were

Early on, give the room a single sentence that sums the person up. This is the spine of the speech. Everything after it is evidence.

Write it as if someone asked you what your father was like and you only had one line to answer. Not what he did. What he was like.

My dad was a man who fixed things. Not because he enjoyed it, but because he could not stand the idea of throwing something away that still had a use in it.

Mum was kind in a completely unsentimental way. She would tell you your hair looked terrible and then drive four hours to sit with you in a hospital car park.

Ken had no small talk at all. He went straight to the thing that mattered, which made him difficult at parties and very good in a crisis.

You will know you have it when the sentence could not be said about anyone else in the room. If it could, it is too general. Go smaller and more specific.

3. Two or three stories, not a timeline

This is the largest part of the eulogy, usually half of it. Pick two or three moments and tell them properly. Do not try to cover a whole life in order, because a life told in order is a list of years, and a list of years is the thing everyone politely sits through.

A story that works has a place, a moment, something said, and a reason you are telling it. Roughly a hundred words each. Here is one at full length so you can see the shape:

When I was seventeen I put my mother's car into a wall. Not badly, but badly enough. I rang her from the side of the road, already crying, already apologising.

She asked one question. Are you hurt. I said no. She said right, stay there, and hung up.

She arrived twenty minutes later, looked at the car for about four seconds, and then looked at me for a lot longer than that. She said, well, cars are cars. Then she drove me home and made me a sandwich I did not want and sat with me while I did not eat it.

That was the whole of her. Deal with the person first. The rest is just things.

Two stories like that, in different registers, will carry a eulogy further than twenty facts. If you only have one good story, use one good story and tell it slowly.

4. The detail only you would know

Include one small, specific, slightly odd thing about the person that nobody else in the room would have put in a speech. This is the part people remember, and it is the part almost every eulogy leaves out.

It is not a big moment. It is a habit, a phrase, a rule they had, the way they did something ordinary. The test is simple: if three other people could have said it, it is not specific enough.

He kept a pencil behind his ear even when he was not using it. Even on holiday. Even, once, at a wedding.

She called every dog she ever met by the wrong name on purpose, because she said it kept them humble.

He would not start the car until everyone had their seatbelt on, and he would not say anything about it. He would just sit there looking straight ahead until you heard the click.

She answered the phone by saying her own telephone number, which stopped being a thing anyone did in about 1994.

Three or four seconds of speech. It will be the line people repeat to each other afterwards in the car park.

5. What they left in other people

Say what of them is still here. This is the part that turns a portrait into a goodbye, because it answers the question the room is quietly asking, which is what now.

Keep it concrete. Not their spirit lives on, but the specific thing they handed to somebody who is sitting in front of you.

My brother has his hands. The same short fingers, the same refusal to use the right tool for anything.

I catch myself saying her lines to my own daughter. The exact phrasing, the exact pause before it. I have given up fighting it.

There are about forty people in this room who got a job, a reference, a lift, or a loan from Ken and never quite paid it back. He kept no record of any of it. That was the point.

One short paragraph is enough. This part goes wrong when it stretches, because it drifts into the general and the general does not move anyone.

6. An ending that stops

End on a short line, said to the person or about the person, and then stop talking. The single most common mistake in a eulogy is not stopping. The speech reaches its natural end, and then three more sentences arrive and flatten it.

Write the last line down word for word and do not improvise it. It is the one line you will be least able to find in the moment.

Thank you for the sandwich I did not eat. Thank you for all of it. Goodbye, Mum.

He would want me to stop now, before this gets sentimental. So I will. Goodnight, Dad.

Nineteen years is a long time to work beside someone. It was not long enough. Thank you, Ken.

If the ending is the part you are stuck on, there are twelve worked endings with the run-up written out in our guide to ending a eulogy.

The four things to leave out

Leave out the full biography, the medical details, family conflict, and jokes that need explaining. Those four account for almost every eulogy that goes wrong in the room.

1. The full timeline. Born in 1948, moved to Leeds in 1971, retired in 2009. The family knows it and the friends do not need it. If a date matters to a story, put it in the story. Otherwise cut it. Two or three facts are plenty of scaffolding.

2. How they died, and the medical detail. No ward names, no scan results, no account of the last fortnight. The people who were there do not want it replayed, and the people who were not there do not need it. One sentence is the absolute maximum, and usually it is better at zero. If the illness genuinely shaped who they were, say what it asked of them, not what it did to them.

3. Family conflict, money, and the will. Whatever the situation is, a funeral is not where it gets settled. This includes hints, pointed pauses, and the sentence that everybody in the front row will correctly decode. If the relationship was complicated, you can be honest without being specific, and honest usually sounds like this: he was not an easy man, and I am not going to pretend otherwise today.

4. Inside jokes that need setup. If the joke takes twenty seconds of explanation, the joke is gone. Keep the ones that land cold and cut the rest. Funny is welcome at a funeral. Confused is not.

Two more worth knowing. You do not have to mention everyone by name, and you will not manage it, so do not try. And you do not have to include a poem or a reading unless you want one. Nobody has ever left a funeral feeling short of poems.

What the six parts look like joined up

Here is a complete eulogy with all six parts in order, about 480 words, roughly three and a half minutes spoken. It is for a father, but the shape holds for anyone. The parts are not labelled in the speech itself, because they should not be visible to the room.

My name is Claire. Peter was my dad. There are a lot of people here who knew him longer than I did, which he would have found very funny, because he always said I got the worst years.

My dad was a man who fixed things. Not because he enjoyed it. Because he could not stand the idea of throwing something out that still had a use in it. Our house was full of objects that had been saved from the bin twice.

When I was seventeen I put his car into a wall. Not badly, but badly enough. I rang him from the side of the road already crying, already apologising. He asked one question. Are you hurt. I said no. He said right, stay there, and hung up.

He arrived twenty minutes later, looked at the car for about four seconds, and looked at me for a lot longer than that. Then he said, well. Cars are cars. And he drove me home.

The other thing I keep coming back to is much smaller. Every Sunday for about eleven years he drove to my grandmother's house, changed a lightbulb or a washer or nothing at all, and sat with her for two hours. He never once described this as visiting her. He always said he was going over to sort something out. He could not say the soft thing, so he did the soft thing instead, every week, for eleven years.

He kept a pencil behind his ear even when he was not using it. Even on holiday. Even, once, at a wedding.

My brother has his hands. Same short fingers, same complete refusal to use the correct tool for anything. My daughter, who is six, has started taking things apart to see how they work, and I have not decided yet whether to stop her. I do not think I will.

He was not a man who said much. He turned up, he sorted it out, and he went home. If you are sitting here today it is almost certainly because at some point he turned up for you too.

Thanks for coming to get me, Dad. Goodbye.

Count the parts. Introduction, the one-line portrait, one story told properly, a second smaller story, the pencil detail, what he left in his children, and a four word ending. No dates, no schools, no job title, no medical history. It is still unmistakably one specific man.

What is the best opening line for a eulogy?

The best opening line names who you are and gets out of the way in one breath. Something like, my name is Sarah, Margaret was my mother, is stronger than any quotation, because the room needs to place you before it can listen to you.

Avoid three openings in particular. A dictionary definition of grief. A famous quote about loss that the person never said and probably never read. And any version of we are gathered here today, which belongs to the celebrant and sounds borrowed in your mouth.

If you want a line with a bit more lift, the reliable move is to open on a small concrete image and let it do the work. My mother had a specific face she made when she thought you were lying. That sort of thing earns you the room in about four seconds.

What is the best last line of a eulogy?

The best last line is short, direct, and addressed to the person who died. Five to twelve words. Goodbye, Dad. Thank you for all of it. Sleep well, old friend. The power is in stopping, not in the phrasing.

A last line fails when it tries to summarise. If your closing sentence begins with the words so, in the end, or as we say goodbye today, it is a summary and it will land flat. You have already said everything. Say the short thing and step away from the lectern.

Write it down. Not in your head, on the page, in large letters. It is the line you are most likely to lose.

How long each of the six parts should be

A eulogy should run 3 to 5 minutes, which is about 500 to 750 words. The six parts divide up roughly like this:

• Who you are: 25 to 40 words, about 15 seconds.
• The one-line portrait: 25 to 50 words.
• The stories: 250 to 400 words. This is half the speech and it should be.
• The detail only you know: 15 to 30 words.
• What they left behind: 60 to 100 words.
• The ending: 10 to 25 words.

Read it aloud with a timer before you commit to the length. Almost everyone reads faster in front of a room than they do at the kitchen table, so a speech that runs 5 minutes at home will often come in around 4 on the day. If you need to be shorter than this, the whole speech can be cut to ninety seconds without losing the shape, and we have short eulogy examples written out in full if that is where you are.

What to do if you break down while reading it

Stop, breathe, and wait. The room will wait with you, for much longer than you think. Nobody has ever left a funeral thinking badly of someone who cried during a eulogy.

Three things help, practically. Print it in 16 point or larger, because you will not be able to read small text through tears. Mark two or three points in the margin where it is safe to pause and drink water. And hand a copy to someone in the front row before you start, so that if you truly cannot continue, they can stand up and finish it without any discussion.

The hardest lines to get through are usually the ones about what the person left behind, not the ones about their death. Practise those sections out loud more than the rest. Saying a sentence for the fifth time is easier than saying it for the first.

Frequently asked questions

What must be included in an eulogy?

Six things: your name and relationship to the person, one sentence describing who they were, two or three specific stories, one small detail only you would know, what they left in the people still here, and a short closing line. Everything else, including dates and job titles, is optional background.

What are the 7 steps to writing an eulogy?

Most seven step guides cover the same ground: gather memories, pick a theme, write the opening, choose two or three stories, add a personal detail, write the ending, then read it aloud and cut. The steps matter less than the order of writing. Write the stories first and the opening last, because the opening is far easier once you know what it is introducing.

How long should a eulogy be?

3 to 5 minutes, or 500 to 750 words. Under 2 minutes feels abrupt unless several people are speaking. Over 7 minutes and you will feel the room go, however good the speech is. If in doubt, err short.

Do you have to include dates, schools and jobs in a eulogy?

No. A eulogy is not an obituary. Include a fact only when a story needs it to make sense. The biographical summary, if the family wants one, usually belongs in the order of service booklet or with the celebrant, not in your four minutes.

Can a eulogy be funny?

Yes, and for some people it would be dishonest not to be. Keep the jokes affectionate rather than sharp, make sure they land without explanation, and put a quiet line immediately after a laugh so the room can settle. Never use humour to avoid saying the serious thing.

What should you not say in a eulogy?

Avoid medical detail about how they died, family disputes, money and the will, inside jokes that need setting up, and a full chronological life history. Also avoid claiming to speak for everyone present, and avoid any sentence that tells the room how they should be feeling.

Before you start writing

You do not need to produce something worthy of the person. That is not a thing anybody has ever managed in four minutes. You need six parts, two decent stories, and one ending you can get through.

Start with the stories, because they are the only part you already have. Everything else is built around them. If you would rather begin with something on the page than with nothing, the eulogy writer asks you a few quiet questions and gives you a draft to argue with, free to read before you decide anything.

Whatever you end up saying, the people in that room are not there to assess it. They are there because they loved the same person you did.