How to write a eulogy for your brother
Sibling grief is routinely overlooked — for weeks people will ask how your parents are holding up and not think to ask about you. Here is what to do with that, and how to write the eulogy only you can write.
Last updated 16 July 2026
The thing only you can give the room
Everyone else knew a finished person. You knew him before he was finished.
You are one of a very small number of people alive who remember the same kitchen, the same back seat of the same car, the same version of your parents when they were young and worried about money. His friends knew the adult. His colleagues knew the professional. His wife knew the man he became.
You knew the eleven-year-old, and you are the only one in that room who can put him in front of them. That is not a small thing — it is frequently the most moving part of a funeral, because it gives everyone a person they never met and will now never meet.
The most useful structure: one story from childhood and one from adulthood. The gap between them does most of the work without you having to explain anything.
Four things that are specifically hard about this one
Nobody will ask how you are
For the next month people will ask, kindly and constantly, how your parents are. Some will ask how his wife is. Very few will ask about you, and this is so common that bereavement services have a name for it — disenfranchised grief.
It is not something to put in the eulogy. It is something to know in advance so it does not blindside you at the wake, and a reason to tell one person, plainly, that you are not all right either.
You may be speaking because your parents cannot
Watching a parent bury a child is its own thing and it will be in your peripheral vision the entire time you speak. Acknowledge them once, early, then go back to being his sibling rather than their representative.
Mum and Dad asked me to do this. I don’t know how to speak for them, so I’m going to speak as his brother, and I hope that’s all right.
If he died young
The strong pull is towards potential — what he would have done, who he would have become, the life he did not get. Be careful with it. Framed as an unfinished life, a eulogy can accidentally suggest that what he did have did not count.
He was a whole person for the whole time he was here. Describe the person. If you want to name the unfairness, name it in one sentence and do not build the speech on it.
The private jokes
You will have twenty years of material nobody else understands, and an in-joke that needs three minutes of setup will not survive a funeral. But you can often keep the joke and cut the explanation — tell the room it is a joke they cannot have, and they will enjoy that more than the joke itself.
Where to find the material
- What did you both get in trouble for?
- What did he call you that nobody else did?
- What did he own at seventeen that he loved unreasonably?
- What did you fight about, repeatedly, for years?
- What did he do that made your parents despair?
- What did he take responsibility for without being asked?
- What is the last thing that made you both laugh?
- What would he be doing at this exact moment if he could?
Two complete examples
For Cormac Vaughan, given by his younger brother
About 470 words · roughly three and a half minutes
There is a joke my brother and I have had running since 1994 and I am not going to explain it to you, because it is not explicable and because it is mine.
All you need to know is that it involves a caravan, a man called Bernard, and a decision our father made on the A9 that we agreed at the time was indefensible. It has three words in it. Cormac said them to me at his own wedding, during the speeches, from the top table, and I had to leave the room.
That is what a brother is. Somebody carrying half of a code that nobody else can read.
He was four years older, which meant that for the whole of my childhood he was a sort of weather system. He was the one who found out what everything was first — music, trouble, girls, how much you could get away with — and he came back down and told me, usually inaccurately.
He told me for two years that our house had been built on a Roman burial site. He was fourteen. I believed him until I was about twenty-two.
And then you grow up and the four years stop mattering. At some point in our thirties we became the same age, which nobody warns you about, and he became someone I rang about things rather than someone I was slightly frightened of.
He was a much better father than either of us expected. I want to say that in front of his children. He was a completely shambolic twenty-year-old and he turned into a man who knew the names of all the teachers.
He was also, and his wife will support me, incapable of being on time for anything, ever, in his life. He was forty minutes late to our father’s seventieth. He was late this morning — the car park situation, apparently — and honestly I found that comforting.
Here is what I cannot get past. There is nobody left who was in the back of that car. There is nobody I can say the three words to.
So I am going to have to teach them to his son, badly, at the wrong moment, which is exactly how they were taught to me.
Bernard, Cormac. Bernard.
For Toby Lindqvist, who died at twenty-six, given by his sister
About 400 words · about three minutes
I have been told several times this week that Toby was taken too soon, and I understand what people mean, and I want to say something slightly different if I may.
Twenty-six years is not a fragment of a life. It was a whole one. He was completely himself the entire time and he did not need any more of it to become a person — he already was one, an extremely specific one, and I would rather talk about him than about the years he did not get.
So: the last ordinary day.
It was a Wednesday, three weeks ago. He came round at about six because he wanted to use our washing machine, which was the reason he came round for most of 2026. He ate a substantial amount of food which was not offered to him. He held the baby for forty minutes while I did something else and I did not thank him properly.
He put a song on. He was extremely serious about music in a way I found tiring, and he made me listen to the whole thing, and he watched my face while it played, which he always did, which drove me mad for fifteen years.
He said the washing machine at his flat was fine actually and he just liked coming over.
That was it. That was the last one. It was a completely unremarkable evening and I have gone over it about four hundred times.
I do not have anything wise to say about why this happened, because there is not anything, and I am not going to pretend for anyone ’s comfort.
What I have got is a brother who came round to use a washing machine he did not need.
Tobes — I am playing the song at the end. You are going to make everyone listen to the whole thing.
Before you finish
- Read it aloud, standing, with a timer. Sibling eulogies run long because the material is endless — see how long should a eulogy be.
- Check the in-jokes. Keep the ones you can leave unexplained; cut the ones that need setting up.
- Give a second copy to someone near the front. More on the day itself on how to deliver a eulogy.
If you need more than this
Eulogy examples has six complete eulogies in different voices and lengths. Our guide to a eulogy for a grandfather explains the gap between the grandfather you knew and the father your parent knew. Eulogy examples for a grandmother has three complete eulogies for a grandmother, including one who raised the speaker. How to write a eulogy walks through the whole thing in six steps, from a blank page to something you can say out loud.