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Eulogy Examples

A eulogy is a short spoken tribute, three to five minutes long, given at a funeral or memorial by someone who knew the person well. It opens by saying who you are to them, tells two or three specific stories rather than summarizing a whole life, and closes with what you want the room to carry out the door. The 4 complete eulogies below run 184 to 440 words, median 297 — about 1.4 to 3.4 minutes read aloud at an ordinary lectern pace of 130 words a minute. Every person named is fictional and every word is free to copy.

Nobody writes a eulogy because they want to. You are writing it because somebody asked, probably on the worst week of your year, and you have four days. The four below are complete — beginning, middle, end — and they are here to be read straight through, out loud, at the speed you would actually say them.

Read one in the closest situation to yours and notice the shape rather than the wording. Every one of them does the same four things in the same order: says who the speaker is, plants one scene you can picture, widens out to what the person was like, and hands the room something to do. That order is the whole craft of it.

4 complete eulogies

Eulogy for a mother, given by her daughter

Sample — fictional. Church service, mixed audience of family and neighbors.

Good morning. For those who don't know me, I'm Nancy, and Dolores was my mother. I want to start with a Thursday, because my mother's life ran on Thursdays. Every Thursday at seven o'clock she called her sister Marilyn, and they talked for exactly as long as it took Mom to finish the dishes and dry her hands. Fifty-one years of that. When Marilyn's husband died, Mom called on Thursday. When I got divorced, Mom called Marilyn on Thursday, and I am fairly sure they solved it between them before either of them told me. That was her: not dramatic, never late, and absolutely immovable about the things she had decided mattered. She kept the books at Pierce & Sons for thirty-four years, and she used to say she liked the work because numbers either came out right or they did not, and nobody could argue you into a different answer. You could hear the whole woman in that sentence. She had no patience for a fuss. She had endless patience for a person. I want to tell you something small. When I was in fourth grade, my mother wrote down the birthday of every child in my class, because I had come home crying that nobody remembered mine. For the next three years, every one of those kids got a card from our house. Some of you are in this room. She never mentioned it to any of us. I found the list in a kitchen drawer last Tuesday, in her handwriting, forty years old. So here is what I would ask. My mother was not a woman who made speeches, and she would think this one is going on too long. She kept people by remembering them out loud. If you want to do something for her this week, call the person you have been meaning to call. Do it on a Thursday. And one more thing, because she would want the record straight. My mother was not a saint and she would be irritated to be described as one. She held a grudge against a neighbour for nineteen years over a fence. She was a difficult person to help — she would not let you carry anything, ever, including when she plainly should have. She thought therapy was something that happened to other people. I say this because I want you to remember the actual woman, who was funny and stubborn and occasionally maddening, rather than a polished version who never existed. The actual woman is the one we are all going to miss. Thank you for being here. She would have counted every one of you.

Eulogy for a grandfather, given by a grandson

Sample — fictional. Graveside service, veteran, large family.

My name is Ray Kemp and Walter Sorenson was my grandfather. He was a hard man to buy a present for, because he already had a good knife and a good hat and he saw no reason to own two of anything. Three Christmases running I bought him socks and he thanked me like I had brought him something from the moon. Grandpa served four years in the Navy and talked about it maybe six times in my whole life. What he talked about instead was the shop. He rebuilt carburetors on a bench in that garage for fifty years, and if you showed up at seven in the morning with a problem, he would look at it, grunt, and hand you a coffee that had been on the burner since five. He didn't fix things for you. He fixed them next to you, slowly, so you would know how next time. I have lost count of the number of men in this town who learned to be useful at that bench. He was not sentimental and he was not talkative and he was the most reliable human being I have ever known. My grandmother got sick in 2019 and he did not leave her side for fourteen months, and when people said he was being a saint about it he looked genuinely confused, because to him there was no decision in it. The last time I saw him he asked whether I was keeping up with the oil changes on my truck. I said yes. He said, "Good," and that was the last thing my grandfather said to me, and honestly, I would not trade it. Grandpa, we're keeping the bench. Thank you all for coming out in this weather. He would have said you didn't have to.

Eulogy for a friend, given at a memorial

Sample — fictional. Non-family speaker, informal celebration of life.

I'm Marcus. Tanya and I met in 1998 in a stairwell, arguing about a parking space, and we were friends for twenty-seven years on the strength of it. Somebody asked me this week to sum her up and I want to be honest: I can't, and I don't think she would let me. Tanya contained a great deal. She was a night-shift nurse who could keep a family calm in the worst hour of their lives, and she was also a woman who once drove three hours to a wedding wearing a costume because she had not read the invitation properly and refused, on principle, to go home and change. What I can tell you is what it was like to be her friend. She answered the phone. That sounds small. It is not small. At two in the morning, at Christmas, in the middle of her own bad weeks, Tanya answered the phone, and then she asked the question you were hoping somebody would ask. There are people in this room who are alive because of that. She never once made it into a story about herself. She was funny in a way that snuck up on you, she was late to everything except emergencies, and she had a laugh that cleared a hallway. The last year was hard and she did not want it discussed, so I won't, except to say that she was herself right to the end, which is the most you can ask and more than most of us manage. Tan — I'm still mad about the parking space. To the rest of you: she'd want you to eat something. There's a great deal of food in the next room, and she planned the menu herself, which tells you everything.

Short eulogy — about two minutes at the lectern

Sample — fictional. For a speaker who wants to keep it very brief.

I'm Ellen, and Paul was my brother. He was forty-four. I am not going to pretend there is a shape to that, because there isn't one. What I want to say is that my brother was a builder. Not by trade — he sold insurance, and he was bored by it — but he could not sit in a house without improving it. He built a treehouse for his daughters that had to be inspected by the county. He built shelves for every person here who ever mentioned owning books. He built a ramp for our father in a single weekend and then argued that it had always been there. He was proud of his girls in a way that was almost embarrassing to witness. He was a terrible singer and did it anyway. He was, and I mean this exactly, a good man, which is a smaller word than people think and a harder one to earn. We are going to miss him for a long time. Thank you for coming. Please go and speak to Karen and the girls before you leave.

What all of these do, and why

The 12 complete eulogies published on this site run 140 to 490 words — 1.1 to 3.8 minutes read aloud at 130 words a minute — with a median of 290. Set that against the 33 fill-in-the-blank obituary templates we publish, whose median is 134 words, and you get the number most people actually want: a eulogy runs about 2.2 times the length of the obituary for the same person. If you have already written the obituary, you are roughly halfway, and the half you have left is the half that has stories in it.

Say who you are in the first sentence
Half the room does not know you. Every eulogy above opens with a name and a relationship, in under ten words, and then gets out of the way. It is also the single easiest sentence to say out loud when your voice is unsteady, which is why it belongs first.
One scene beats ten adjectives
"She was generous" evaporates. The list of classmates' birthdays in a kitchen drawer does not. Pick one afternoon you can see, write it in four or five sentences, and let the room draw the adjective themselves.
You are allowed to be brief
The short eulogy above is a complete eulogy. Nobody at a funeral has ever wished a tribute were longer, and a tight three minutes said steadily is worth more than eight minutes you cannot get through.
Print it in 14-point and mark your breaths
Write it to be read, not to be admired on the page. Short sentences. Double-spaced. A slash where you want to stop and breathe. If there is a line you cannot say in the kitchen without breaking, you will not say it at the lectern either — move it earlier, or give it to someone else.
End with an instruction, not a conclusion
Three of the four above close by telling the room what to do: call someone on a Thursday, keep the bench, go and speak to the family. It gives people somewhere to put the feeling, and it ends the eulogy cleanly instead of trailing off.

The obituary is the other half — write it here

Nearly every family writing a eulogy also owes a newspaper or a funeral home an obituary, usually within a day or two. The writer below is pre-filled with fictional sample details so you can see the shape of a finished obituary. Replace them with your own. It composes the text in your browser — nothing is uploaded, and nothing is required.

Write the obituary

Answer what you can and skip what you can’t — every field is optional. Composed entirely in your browser; nothing you type is uploaded.

Common questions

How long should a eulogy be?
Three to five minutes is the standard, and most funeral directors will ask you to stay inside five. At a normal speaking pace of about 130 words a minute that is roughly 400 to 650 words — about one and a half to two and a half double-spaced pages. If more than one person is speaking, aim for the shorter end.
What is the difference between a eulogy and an obituary?
An obituary is written to be printed and read silently by people who may not have known the person; it announces the death, gives the biographical facts and carries the service details. A eulogy is written to be spoken once, to people who did know them, and it is allowed to be personal, funny and incomplete. Most families write both in the same week.
Can I read a eulogy from a piece of paper?
Yes, and you should. Nobody expects you to speak from memory at a funeral, and holding the page gives your hands something to do. Print it large, in 14-point or bigger, and keep a copy in your pocket in case you put the first one down somewhere.
What if I cry while giving the eulogy?
You stop, you breathe, and you carry on, and the room waits for you — that is what the room is for. It helps to have a glass of water on the lectern, to mark a spot where you can pause, and to ask a second person to be ready to finish reading if you cannot.
Can I use humour in a eulogy?
If the person was funny, yes. A laugh in the first two minutes releases the room and lets people listen to the serious part. The test is whether the joke is at the person's expense or in their voice; the second is a tribute, the first is a risk you do not need to take that day.
Are these eulogy examples free to copy?
Yes. Every person on this page is fictional and the text is here to be taken, whole or in pieces. Change the names and the details to yours, or keep the structure and write your own lines into it.