What to say at your mother's funeral
2 min read
The difficulty with speaking about a mother is that the role swallows the person. Everything that comes to mind first — devoted, selfless, always there — is true and says nothing, because it is what everyone says.
Speak about the woman, not the role
Ask yourself what she was like when she was not being your mother. At work. With her sisters. At twenty-three.
Most people have no idea, which is itself worth saying out loud, and worth asking her friends about this week. The stories you get back are usually the best material in the speech, because nobody in the room has heard them either.
Three questions that unlock it
What did she say? A phrase she used constantly. The thing she said when you were wrong. The thing she said to end an argument. A room recognizes a phrase instantly, and it brings her voice back into it.
What did she refuse to do? Refusals define people more sharply than virtues. She would not drive on motorways. She would not have the television on at dinner. She would not let anyone pay.
What did she do that embarrassed you? Handle this with judgment, but a small affectionate example does more than any tribute — it is the detail that makes people laugh, and laughing in that room is a relief everyone is waiting for.
A structure that holds
- Who you are, one sentence.
- A memory from childhood — specific, small, not momentous.
- Something about her that you only understood as an adult.
- One thing she gave you that you carry.
- A short ending. Stop.
Four to five minutes.
Worked example
I'm Sarah, the middle one.
When we were small, mum used to drive us to the coast in February. Not summer — February, when the car park was empty and the café was shut. We'd sit in the car with the windows fogging up, eating sandwiches she'd made at six in the morning, and she'd say: "Look at that. And it's free."
I thought she was being strange. I understood it about fifteen years later, when I had no money and two small children, and I drove them to a car park by the sea in February.
She was not a patient woman. She could not let an argument go, and she was almost always right, which made it worse. But she never once made any of us feel like an inconvenience, and I have met very few people you can say that about.
Thank you for being here. She would have counted the cars.
If it was complicated
Not every mother was kind, and a eulogy is not the place to settle it or to lie.
You are allowed to be narrow. Speak about one true thing — she was funny, she was capable, she loved the garden — and leave the rest. A short honest speech is better than a long false one, and everyone who needs to understand will understand.