You have a few days and you cannot think. This is a method rather than inspiration, because inspiration is not available this week. A complete example, built on the same structure, is further down.
Start with a list, not a draft
Do not open a document and try to write. Open a note and write down every concrete thing you can remember: phrases they used, what their kitchen smelled like, the argument they always had, what they did that embarrassed you, the thing they were proud of and never said.
Twenty items. Do not filter. This takes an hour and it is most of the work.
Pick three
Now choose two or three that a room of people would recognize, or that would surprise them. Three stories is a eulogy. A life summarized from birth to death is a biography, and it is the version that puts a room to sleep.
The test for each one: can you tell it in ninety seconds and does it show something about who they were rather than what they achieved.
Build it in four parts
Who you are. One sentence. Half the room does not know.
For those who don't know me, I'm Anna, Margaret's youngest.
The stories. Two or three, in whatever order feels right. Concrete details only: names, places, what was said. "She was generous" is not a story. "She gave away the coat she was wearing, in November, and told us she'd been too warm anyway" is.
What they gave you. One short passage. This is the only place where you are allowed to be direct about feeling, and it works because everything before it has earned it.
How you end. A short line, and stop. Do not trail off into thanking everybody — that belongs to whoever is running the service.
How long
Three to five minutes. That is 400 to 700 words read aloud, which is much shorter than it looks on a page.
Read it out loud with a timer before the day. Everybody overruns, and the page count is not a reliable guide because you will slow down.
A complete example
A nephew speaking about his aunt, a retired primary school teacher. Just under three minutes read aloud, and each paragraph is one of the four parts above.
For those who don't know me, I'm Daniel, Jean's nephew.
The last time I saw Jean was in July, on her balcony. She handed me a pair of binoculars and said, "Look, the robins are back." She was eighty-three, she could barely manage the stairs, and she was following the lives of two birds like a foreman running a building site.
That was Jean: a curiosity that never switched off. She taught for thirty-eight years, and I don't think she ever stopped. She asked questions and actually listened to the answers. When I was twelve she asked me what I wanted to be. I said an astronaut. She didn't laugh. Three weeks later a book about the planets came in the post, with a card: "To get you started."
She was stubborn, too. Anyone who tried to take her car keys off her will remember. And funny, in a dry way you never saw coming. In hospital in March, a nurse asked whether she was in pain anywhere. "Only my pride," she said.
She never had children. But there are a lot of us in this room, nephews, nieces, former pupils, who can say she taught us something. What she taught me was to look. To stop in front of a nest, a cloud, a person, and wonder what was going on there. I never became an astronaut. But I still look up.
Jean, I'll keep an eye on the robins.
Notice what it leaves out: dates, the career, a list of virtues. The one line about feeling comes near the end, once the stories have earned it.
Getting through it on the day
- Print it, large. Double-spaced, 16 point or bigger. Your hands will shake and a phone screen will dim.
- Mark your breaths. A slash where you want to pause. It is a script, not an essay.
- Bring water, and put it where you can reach it.
- Have a second person. Give a copy to someone in the front row who has agreed to stand up and finish if you cannot. Knowing that is there is often what lets you get through it yourself.
- If you cry, stop and breathe. Nobody is judging the delivery. Silence in that room is fine.
Afterwards, keep it
The eulogy is heard once, by the people who happened to be there, and then it lives in a drafts folder until the phone is replaced.
It is usually the most complete thing anyone ever writes about that person. Put it somewhere the whole family can read it later — the grandchildren who were too small to follow it will want it in twenty years.
There are five worked paths — your father, your mother, a grandmother, a brother or sister and a friend or colleague. When your own words will not come, a poem or a piece of music carries the part you do not have to say yourself. What is left afterwards is the subject of the main guide.
