How to write a eulogy for your best friend
You may be grieving as hard as anyone in that room while standing outside the official order of it. That is worth naming before you write a word.
Last updated 20 August 2026
Grieving outside the order of things
Funerals have a hierarchy. Partner, children, parents, siblings, then everyone else. It is not unkind and it is mostly necessary — but if you have lost the person you spoke to every day for twenty years, you will find yourself somewhere near the back of it, being handed a cup of tea by people who have lost less.
There is no compassionate leave for a friend. Very few people will think to ask how you are. You may be organising nothing, deciding nothing, and consulted about nothing, while feeling it as hard as anyone in the building.
None of this belongs in the eulogy. All of it is worth knowing in advance, so that it does not ambush you at the wake — and it is a good reason to tell one person, out loud, that you are not alright either.
What only you can give the family
You knew a version of them their family may never have met. Parents in particular are often quietly desperate to know who their child was out in the world — what they were like at work, who they looked after, what they were like at two in the morning on a bad night.
Turn to the front row at least once and tell them. One sentence, addressed directly: “To his mum and dad — I want you to know what he was like when it was just us.” It is frequently the most valuable thirty seconds of the service.
Then be specific. Not that you were close, but the standing arrangement, the phrase they always used, the thing they always did that drove you mad.
Two cautions
“Best friend” is a claim. There may be three people in that room who thought they held that title, and one of them may be right. Say it once if it is true, or use something warmer and less exclusive — “one of the great friendships of my life” — and let the stories prove it.
Sort your material before you write. Friends hold things families do not: old relationships, money, health, things said in confidence. Death does not release you from confidence. If you are unsure about a story, run it past one family member first — it takes one message. See how to write a eulogy for a friend for the full list of what to leave out.
Two complete examples
For Nell Garrity, given by her friend of twenty-four years
About 430 words · roughly three and a half minutes
My friend Nell lost everything, constantly, for the entire time I knew her.
Keys, phones, cards, one passport in an airport, and — famously, in 2014 — an entire car, which she reported stolen and which was in a different car park.
She lost her wedding ring twice. Both times it turned up in a coat. Not the same coat.
I have been trying to work out why this was funny rather than infuriating, because objectively it should have been infuriating, and I think it is because Nell was completely present. She was not distracted by something more important — she was distracted by whatever was in front of her, absolutely, to the exclusion of where she had put her keys.
If you were talking to Nell you had all of her. She did not glance at her phone. She would not look past you at a party to see who else had arrived, which I have since learned is rarer than it should be.
To Marion and to Gus — I want to tell you something about your daughter that you might not have seen, because she was different with us and she was very protective of you.
She was the person everyone rang first. Every single one of us in this room who was ever in trouble rang Nell before we rang anybody else, because she did not panic and she did not judge and she was already putting her coat on while you were still explaining. She sat in a hospital with me for eleven hours in 2019 and did not once look at her watch.
She was chaos and she was the most reliable person I have ever known. I do not know how both of those were true and they were.
I have got her spare key. She gave it to me in about 2011 in case she lost hers, which she did, seven times.
I am not giving it back and nobody is to ask me for it.
Bye, Nell. Check the coat.
For Dermot Feeney, given by his oldest friend
About 400 words · about three minutes
In 1998 Dermot and I made an arrangement in a pub, and neither of us ever mentioned it again, and he kept it for twenty-eight years.
My father had just died. I was twenty-three and I was not managing it, and Dermot — who was also twenty-three and equally unequipped — said that he would ring me on the anniversary. Every year. That was the whole arrangement.
And he did. The fourteenth of March, every year, for twenty-eight years. Sometimes we spoke for an hour. Sometimes it was ninety seconds because he was on a building site. In 2011 he rang me from his own honeymoon, which his wife has confirmed and which she says she found extremely irritating at the time.
He never once said what the call was for. He would just say, “Alright. How’s things,” and we would talk about nothing, and then he would go.
I have thought about this a great deal since Tuesday. Twenty-eight years is a lot of years to remember a date that has nothing to do with you.
That was Dermot all over. He did not do sympathy — he was, frankly, terrible at the actual words, and if you cried in front of him he looked at the floor and offered you a lift somewhere.
But he turned things into arrangements, and then he kept them. He drove his neighbour to dialysis for two years on the same principle. No discussion. It was simply now a thing that happened on Tuesdays.
To Sinéad and the girls — he was exactly the same with us as he was with you, which I hope is a comfort. There was only ever one of him.
It is the fourteenth of March in six months and I am going to be waiting for the phone.
Alright, Dermot. How’s things.
Before you finish
- Run any uncertain story past one family member.
- Turn to the family once, deliberately, and address them.
- Read it aloud with a timer — see how long should a eulogy be, and how to deliver a eulogy for the day itself.
If you need more than this
Our collection of eulogy examples has six complete eulogies in different voices and lengths. Our guide to a eulogy for a wife starts by saying you do not have to speak, and why plain words carry more than large ones. How to write a eulogy for your uncle is about family without the authority, and the uncle who quietly showed up. How to write a eulogy walks through the whole thing in six steps, from a blank page to something you can say out loud.