Words of Remembrance Examples That Fit the Parish Rules

Words of remembrance are a short personal reflection on the life of someone who died, spoken by one family member at a Catholic funeral. At a funeral Mass they come after Communion, just before the final blessing. Most parishes allow two to three minutes, which is about 300 to 400 words. One page, one speaker, read from the ambo.

The parish office sent you a sheet. It tells you where in the Mass you will stand, how many minutes you have, and that this is not a eulogy in the ordinary sense. It does not tell you what to say.

So here are five complete sets of words of remembrance, plus a one minute version for a parish that allows almost no time. Each is written to be read out loud and each fits the length a parish will permit. Take the one closest to your situation, change the names and details until they are true, and read it. If the funeral is this week, go straight to the examples. The rules are underneath them.

What are words of remembrance at a funeral?

Words of remembrance are a brief reflection on the life of the person who died, offered in the context of their faith, given by one member of the family or someone speaking for the family. At a funeral Mass they come after Communion and before the final blessing. At a vigil or wake service you are usually given a little longer.

Three words in that definition do the real work.

One. Most parishes allow a single speaker. If three of you want to speak, one reads and names the other two.

Brief. Two to three minutes. Ask the parish office for their number and write to it.

Faith. This does not mean doctrine. It means you may say that she prayed, that he came every Sunday, that she kept a rosary in the glovebox. One honest line satisfies it, and there is a section below on what to write if they had none.

Words of remembrance or a eulogy: is there a difference?

Inside a Mass, yes. The homily belongs to the priest and reflects on the readings. The words of remembrance belong to the family and reflect on the person. A eulogy is longer, freer, and usually given at a funeral home or a graveside.

If your service is a Mass, write the short form on this page. If you have five or six minutes somewhere else, you want the longer form, and our Christian eulogy examples with scripture are built for that length. If the family has not settled who should stand up at all, how families decide who gives the eulogy covers that conversation.

Five words of remembrance you can adapt

Every one of these is complete as it stands. None is a template with brackets in it. Read the one that fits, swap in your own names and one real detail, and cut anything that is not true of your person.

1. For a father who was practical rather than talkative

Plain, steady, and faith described as something he did rather than something he discussed. Read by a son. 387 words.

My father's name was Michael Doyle, and he would have been annoyed that all of you took a Tuesday morning off work for him.

He was a carpenter for forty one years. He built the shelving in the sacristy in this church, and Father reminded me this morning that it has not shifted in thirty years. Dad would have said that was down to using proper screws. He had firm opinions about screws, and about people who bought the cheap ones.

I only have a few minutes, so I am going to tell you one thing about him, because it is the whole of him and it will do.

When I was fifteen I crashed his van. Not badly, but badly enough. I sat at the kitchen table for two hours working out how to tell him. When I finally said it, he put down his tea and asked, are you hurt. I said no. He said, then there is nothing here that cannot be fixed, and he picked his tea back up.

That was him, start to finish. He checked whether anyone was hurt. Then he fixed the thing. He did it for us, he did it for the neighbours, and he did it for whoever turned up at the door on a Saturday with a broken chair and no money in their pocket.

He came to this church every Sunday for fifty years and he never once sat us down and talked to us about God. He just came. He came when my mother was ill. He came the year the yard nearly went under. He came the Sunday after we buried his brother Tom, and he sang, badly, the way he always sang. I understand it now in a way I did not at twenty. He did not have the words for what he believed. He had turning up.

My daughter is four. She has his hands, square and useless at anything small, and she already wants to know how things come apart.

He died on Tuesday morning with my mother holding his hand. That is the one piece of luck in this whole week and I am grateful for it.

Dad, the shelving is holding. Nobody is hurt. We will fix the rest of it between us.

Thank you all for being here.

2. For a mother, built around one story

Warm without being sentimental. It commits to a single story and lets that stand for everything else. Read by a daughter. 375 words.

Thank you for coming this morning, and thank you to Father Burke and to the choir, who sang my mother's hymn better than she ever did.

My mother was Patricia Nolan. Pat to almost everyone, Patsy to her sisters, and Mrs Nolan to about four hundred children who passed through her classroom at St Brigid's between 1979 and 2011.

I could stand here and list her. Instead I want to tell you about a Thursday in February.

I was nine and I had not been picked for anything. Not the choir, not the team, not the Nativity. I came home and said I was not good at anything, and she did not tell me that was nonsense, which is what I expected. She put her coat back on and drove me to the pound shop and bought a notebook with a blue cover for eighty pence.

She said, write down everything you notice this week that nobody else notices.

I filled it. I wrote that the lollipop man hummed only on Fridays. I wrote that our dog slept on the cold tiles when he was in trouble. She read every page and she did not correct my spelling, which anyone who was taught by her will tell you cost her something.

At the end of the week she said, that is a thing you are good at. Nobody hands out a medal for it, so you will have to know it yourself.

I have made a living with that for twenty years. She never once reminded me where it came from.

She did that for a lot of you, I think. I have heard four versions of the same story since Sunday, from four different people, all of whom thought they were the only one.

She said the rosary every night, usually while the news was on, which annoyed my father for fifty years. She came to this church for every single one of those years, including the ones when she was furious with it.

She kept the blue notebook. I found it on Sunday in the drawer with the good scissors, where it had been for thirty two years.

Mam, I noticed. I noticed all of it. I am writing it down.

Thank you.

3. For a grandmother whose faith was the centre of her life

The openly devotional register. Use this one when the person really did pray, and when saying so plainly is the truest thing you can do. Read by a granddaughter. 377 words.

My grandmother was Teresa Carmody and she was ninety one. She was baptised in this church, married in this church, and buried two husbands and a son from this church, and this morning we have brought her back one last time.

I want to be honest about what she was, because I think people soften it at funerals and she would not thank me for that.

She was devout. Not vaguely, not culturally. She was at seven o'clock Mass five mornings a week until she was eighty six and her hip stopped her. She said the rosary every day of her adult life. When my cousin was in hospital in 2009, she said it three times a day for eleven weeks, and she kept count in the back of a diary, and I have that diary at home.

What I did not understand as a child is that none of this made her gentle. She was funny and sharp and she held a grudge about a disputed boundary hedge for twenty three years. She prayed for the neighbour in question daily, and described this to me once as the long way round to the same place.

Her faith was useful. That is the word for it. When my mother died, Nana was seventy and she had buried her own daughter, and she got up the next morning and went to Mass and then came back and made breakfast for four grandchildren who had nobody else to do it. She did not explain it to us. She just did the next thing, every day, for nine years, until we were grown.

She was not frightened at the end. I asked her, about a month ago, if she was. She said she had been going to the same place every morning for seventy years and did not expect to be turned away at the door now.

She chose the hymns for this morning in 2019 and wrote them on the back of an envelope, and she chose four, because she said people never allow enough time.

So we are where she wanted to be, with the candle lit, and the prayers said properly.

Nana, the hedge is still there. We will leave it where it is.

Thank you all.

4. For a husband whose wife held the faith and he did not

For the very common case where the service is Catholic because the family is, and the person who died was not. It says so once, without apology, and moves on. Read by a wife. 369 words.

Thank you all for coming, and thank you to Father Hughes, who has been kind to our family this week in a way I will not forget.

My husband was Dermot Lynch. We were married thirty four years.

I should say the obvious thing, because half of this church knows it and the other half is wondering. Dermot was not a churchgoer. He drove me here most Sundays for thirty four years and sat outside in the car with the radio on and the paper folded over the wheel. We are here today because this is my church and it was our family's church, and because he told me years ago, in the kitchen, that when the time came I should do whatever I needed and he would not be in a position to argue.

So I will tell you what he was faithful to instead, because he was faithful.

He was at the gate of the school at twenty past three every day for eleven years. Not some days. Every day. He rearranged a working life around a gate.

He rang his mother every Sunday at six until the week she died, and then he rang his aunt instead, because somebody ought to be ringing her.

He drove the Duggans to the hospital in Galway twice a week for the whole of one winter and never mentioned it to me once. I found out from Mrs Duggan on Monday.

He was not a man with a great deal to say about what he believed. He had a short list of people and he did not drop any of them. For thirty four years, whatever else was going on, I was on the list.

I think that is a kind of faith and I am content to leave the finer points of it to people better qualified than me.

Our grandson asked me on Thursday whether Granddad was in heaven. I told him his grandfather spent thirty four years getting other people where they needed to be, and I would not worry about him finding the way.

Dermot, I am going to keep driving myself here on Sundays. I will leave the radio on in the car.

Thank you.

5. For someone who died young or suddenly

Shorter sentences, no attempt to explain the death, and the ending refuses to tidy it up. Read by a sister. 363 words.

My brother was Eoin Barrett. He was twenty nine on the fourth of October.

I am not going to say anything this morning about how he died, or about what any of us think it means. I do not know what it means. Nobody standing here does.

What I can do is tell you who he was, because that part I am sure of.

He was the youngest of four and he was the funny one, which in our house was a job with real responsibilities. He could read a room in about two seconds. If my mother had had a bad day, Eoin was the one who knew before anyone said anything, and he would start on something ridiculous until she laughed despite herself.

He was a terrible timekeeper. He was late to my wedding, late to his own graduation, and late to a hospital appointment that he then charmed his way into anyway.

He was generous in a way that was slightly annoying. He lent people money he did not have. Three different people have told me this week that he gave them something, and in two cases it was the thing he had been saving for himself.

He was good with our grandmother. He sat with her on Sundays long after the rest of us had found reasons not to.

I have been asked a few times this week whether we have found any comfort. Not yet. What we have found is each other, in my parents' kitchen, every night since Thursday, with too much food in the house and the kettle never off.

So I will say the one thing I do believe. Nothing about twenty nine years is enough. And the twenty nine years we got were very good, and they were funny, and they were his.

My mother asked me to say thank you to his friends, who have been at the house every evening, eating everything and fixing nothing, which is exactly what he would have done for any of them.

Eoin, we are all here. Every one of us. You would have been delighted with the turnout and insufferable about it.

Thank you for coming.

6. The one minute version, when the parish allows almost no time

Some parishes give you two minutes, and some give you one. This runs at just over a minute and still carries a name, a detail and a line of faith. 155 words.

My mother was Anne Gallagher and she was eighty three.

She was a nurse at the Mater for thirty one years, mostly on nights, which she preferred, because she said people tell you the truth at four in the morning.

She was the person our whole family rang first. Not for advice, particularly. For the tone of voice. She had a way of saying, right, well, that is where we are then, which somehow made things manageable.

She came to this church every Sunday and she lit a candle on the way out, every single time, for her brother Peter who died in 1968. Fifty seven years of candles for a boy she knew for nine years.

That is the part of her I want you to take home. She did not forget people. She kept them lit.

Mam, thank you. We will keep the candle going.

Thank you all for being here this morning.

How long should words of remembrance be?

Two to three minutes, which is 280 to 420 words at a reading pace of about 140 words a minute. If your parish gave you a number, write to it. If nobody did, 350 words is safe almost everywhere.

• 1 minute: about 140 words. Example 6 above runs to 155.
• 90 seconds: about 210 words.
• 2 minutes: about 280 words.
• 2 minutes 30: about 350 words. The usual sweet spot.
• 3 minutes: about 420 words. Examples 1 to 5 all sit just under this.
• 5 minutes: about 700 words, and more than most parishes allow after Communion.

Read it out loud with a timer, not in your head. Most people read 10 to 15 percent slower at a funeral. If you are over, cut the list of relatives, the run of jobs and schools, and any sentence that tells the room how to feel. Never cut the one real story. Our guide to how long a eulogy should be works through the same cuts at longer lengths.

Some parishes ask to see the text a day or two beforehand. That is about length, not censorship.

What if they were not religious? How to write the faith line honestly

Say what they were faithful to instead. Name their actual loyalties rather than invent a devotion they did not have. Nobody in that church will be fooled, and a false line about how she loved her faith is the one thing that will make the room uncomfortable.

Name the practice, not the belief. He came to this church every Sunday for fifty years and never once talked to us about God. He just came. That is true of a man who may have believed very little, and it belongs in a church.

Say the gap once, then move. He sat outside in the car with the radio on, and we are here because this is my church. Said once, that is honesty. Said three times, it is an argument nobody came for.

Transfer the word. He was faithful to a short list of people and never dropped one. She kept her word to people who could do nothing for her. Faithfulness is what is being described either way.

If their faith really was the centre of their life, the opposite applies: do not soften it to spare the relatives who did not share it. Say she was at seven o'clock Mass five mornings a week, because that is the fact. To carry a line of scripture instead, our eulogy bible verses and where to use them gives sixteen passages with the lead-in lines written.

Reading it at the ambo without losing your place

Print it in 16 point, double spaced, on one side of one sheet. You will be at a fixed stand, at a fixed microphone, holding paper with unsteady hands.

• One side only. Turning a page at an ambo is where people lose their place.
• Mark your breaths. A forward slash wherever you want to stop. Most people read far too fast.
• Do not touch the microphone. Stand close and speak normally. Fiddling with it costs you your composure.
• Look up twice. At the name and at the last line. Reading the rest off the page is completely acceptable.
• Agree a backup reader. Hand someone a copy beforehand. Having asked is what makes it unnecessary.
• If you cry, stop and breathe. The room will wait. Put a finger on the line so you can find it again.

Two things most parishes ask you to leave out: song lyrics or secular poetry in place of scripture, which belong at the graveside or the reception, and the detail of how the person died, unless the family has agreed otherwise.

If you have the shape but not the words, the eulogy writer asks a few questions about them and puts a full draft on the page for you to cut to the parish length. The preview is free.

Questions people ask about words of remembrance

Words of remembrance vs eulogy: what is the difference?

Words of remembrance are the short reflection the family gives inside a Catholic funeral Mass, usually after Communion and capped at two to three minutes. A eulogy is the longer, freer speech given at a funeral home, a graveside or a celebration of life, often five minutes or more. The content is similar. The length and the setting are not.

Can you provide some examples of Catholic words of remembrance?

Yes. The six examples above are all written for a Catholic service and all sit inside the usual parish cap: a father described through one story, a mother built around a single Thursday, an openly devout grandmother, a husband who was not a churchgoer, a young man who died suddenly, and a one minute version.

What is a good message to remember someone who died?

One specific thing they did, not an adjective. She lit a candle on the way out of Mass every Sunday for fifty seven years for a brother who died in 1968 is a message people remember. She was a kind and loving person is not, because it could be said about anyone in the church.

What are some common Catholic sayings at funerals?

The ones you will hear most are eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them; may she rest in peace; may the angels lead you into paradise; and we commend her to the mercy of God. You do not have to use any of them.

How do you say in remembrance of someone?

In a speech, name them and then name one thing only they did: in remembrance of my grandmother, who kept count of her rosaries in the back of a diary. On a card, a plaque or an order of service, the short forms are in loving memory of, in remembrance of, and remembering, followed by the name and the years.

The parish has already told you most of what it needs. Write down the one thing about them that nobody else in that church would think to mention, and build the rest around it. If you want somewhere to start the draft, the preview is free.