A eulogy is not a biography. Nobody at the service is grading you on completeness, and the person who tries to include everything usually ends up rushing past the parts that mattered. What belongs is simpler than it feels in the empty-document moment: the true things that make the people in the room nod.

Start from what made them recognizable

The best test for a eulogy detail is recognition, not importance. Did she always eat the burnt piece “because it was the cook’s privilege”? Did he narrate the parking search like a golf announcer? Those details belong, because they are the ones family will recognize on sight. A lifetime summary can belong to the printed program; the eulogy is for the person the room actually misses.

A workable shape

Most spoken eulogies land between five and ten minutes — roughly 700 to 1,300 words at a speaking pace. Longer is possible, but attention at a funeral is fragile, and grief makes long speeches heavy. A shape that reliably works:

  1. Open with one true small thing — a habit, a phrase, a scene. Not “he was born in 1948.”
  2. Two or three stories, from different parts of their life — the years before the family, the middle years, the recent ordinary days. Different contributors often hold exactly these different chapters.
  3. The flaws, held kindly. A person without edges is a stranger. One gentle, honest imperfection makes every other sentence more believable.
  4. Close with what stays — what the family will keep doing, saying, or noticing because of them.

What usually belongs somewhere else

  • The full chronology. Dates and milestones can live in the program or an obituary.
  • Every story you were sent. If memories were gathered from many people, the eulogy can honor the rest by choosing well, not by including all. Thank the contributors by name in person.
  • Anything told to you in confidence or clearly meant as a private memory. When people share memories, some are gifts for the family; a few are just for you.
  • Scores to settle. If a relationship was hard, honesty is possible without a hearing. Name the difficulty gently or leave room for it in how you tell a complicated story.
  • Announcements and logistics. The eulogy is not the moment for parking instructions or the invitation to the house after.

When memories disagree

Families remember the same event differently — who said it, whether it was funny or awful, which year it happened. You are not writing a court record. It is fair to choose the version the most people recognize, or to keep the disagreement itself: “Mum swore it was the summer of the broken ankle. Dad always said she invented that.” Both being remembered is often the truest version.

One last thing

If the draft is being built from what many people shared, expect the first version to be too long and slightly stitched-together. That is what a second pass is for. Cutting is not disloyal; the strongest eulogies are usually the ones where someone was brave enough to remove a good story that was not the story.

This is general guidance about writing, not professional advice.