A headstone is the most permanent thing a family will ever commission, and it is usually ordered in the worst month of their lives, from a catalogue, under time pressure.
Two things help: knowing how little text fits, and knowing what has to be approved.
How much actually fits
Far less than people imagine. A standard stone holds a handful of lines, often around forty to sixty characters each depending on the lettering and the size of the stone.
That means the usual content is:
- The name, as they were known. Nicknames are common and completely acceptable.
- Two dates. Years alone, or full dates. Write months in words if there is room.
- A relationship line. "Beloved wife, mother and grandmother." This is the line families argue about, because it decides whose relationship is named.
- One short line, if anything is left.
Everything else — a long tribute, a poem, a list of grandchildren — does not fit and is what the mason will gently tell you when you are already attached to it.
Choosing the one line
The good ones are short and specific. The weak ones are long and general.
Four approaches that work:
Something they said. A phrase the family knows. It needs no explanation on the stone; the people who understand it are the people who will stand there.
A description, not a virtue. "He kept bees" says more than "a devoted father", because it is only true of him.
A relationship stated plainly. "Together, and now together." For a couple in one plot.
A line from something they loved. Check copyright if it is modern — a mason will cut whatever you give them, but reproducing a copyrighted lyric on a public monument is reproduction.
Read it out loud. Then read it imagining you are eighty and standing there in the rain. Anything that sounds clever will not survive that test; anything plain will.
A plaque is not an epitaph
Many people asking what to put on a headstone are really asking what to write on a memorial plaque — and it is a different object. The epitaph is cut into the stone itself: permanent, and decided by whoever owns the grave. A plaque is added — set on the grave or beside it, usually given by a child, a partner, colleagues or a club. It can be replaced or moved, and one grave can carry several. That changes everything about the text: you can write on a plaque what you would never have cut into stone for the next fifty years.
So the conventions differ. A plaque speaks to the person who died from the first line, where an epitaph speaks about them. It is signed on the last: without the name of whoever gave it, nobody knows who it is from. And it is allowed to show feeling, where the epitaph is held back — restraint is the stone's job, not the plaque's.
Three examples, written for this page:
Mum, you would have hated the fuss. We made one anyway.
Tom and Ellie
Frank, first through the clubhouse door every Saturday. Forty seasons.
Your friends at the bowling club
Margaret, fifty-two years, and I would say yes again.
Ken
If the first line is the hard part, the memorial plaque wording tool starts from the same conventions. Plaques are bound by the same cemetery rules as everything else on a grave, so check before fixing one.
What needs approval
In most places you cannot simply order what you like.
Cemeteries and churchyards commonly have rules on the size, the material, the color of the stone and, frequently, on the wording. Churchyards in particular often approve inscriptions in advance, and the criteria can be conservative about humor, nicknames and anything not conventionally religious.
Ask for the regulations in writing before you design anything. A mason who works in that cemetery will usually know them, and asking them first is the whole trick.
The decisions you cannot undo
- Leaving room for a spouse. If the plot is for two, the layout has to reserve space now. It cannot be rearranged later.
- Spelling and dates. Check both against a certificate, not from memory. Errors are cut in stone and fixing them means a new stone.
- Material. Granite survives, limestone weathers and softens within decades. A softer stone is often the more beautiful choice and the one whose lettering disappears first.
- Anything attached. Photographs, ceramic portraits and QR codes are permitted in many cemeteries and forbidden in others. Ask before ordering, and prefer what can be removed over what cannot.
What does not fit on the stone
Everything else: the life, the photographs, the voice, what the grandchildren should know.
A headstone was never able to hold those, which is why families have always supplemented it — with a box of photographs, an album, a story told at a table. The only question worth asking is whether that supplement is somewhere the whole family can reach, or in one person's attic.
Eight words are all a stone holds. The rest — photographs, letters, a recorded voice — is what a QR code on a headstone solves, and the main guide explains how. If what you want to write runs much longer than a line, it is not an epitaph: see how to write a eulogy and the main guide.
