Writing a eulogy for your daughter
Nothing here will help with the fact of it. This page is only practical — offered gently, for something no parent should be asked to do.
Last updated 29 August 2026
You do not have to speak
No one requires this of you. Most parents do not speak at their child’s funeral, and the room will think nothing of it except that they are sorry.
Her brother or sister can do it. A friend, her partner, an aunt, the celebrant. Ask, and someone will say yes, and most will be relieved to have something they can do for you.
Or write what you want said and hand it to someone else to read in your name. Your words, someone else’s voice. That is a completely ordinary thing to arrange and it is often the right answer.
One thing, and then stop
If you do speak: a minute, perhaps two.
The problem is not that there is too little to say. It is that all of it arrives at once, and standing in front of a room holding an entire daughter is not something a person can do.
So choose one thing. Something small and exact — what she said when she answered the phone, the thing she was ridiculous about, what she was like in the passenger seat. One true detail will put her in that room more completely than any attempt to sum her up.
Write your final sentence on a card and learn it, so that if everything else goes you can still finish. Give a copy to someone in the second row and tell them they may need to take over. Then stopping is not failing. It is the plan.
She was not a life cut short
People will say she was taken too soon, and they will mean it with love, and it is true.
But be careful about making it the shape of the eulogy. A speech built on what she would have done can leave the impression that the years she had were a fragment — a preface to a life that never started. They were not. They were the life.
She was fully herself the entire time. Nineteen or forty-one, she had her own opinions, her own way of laughing at things, her own infuriating habits that you would give anything to be irritated by again.
Describe that. It is the one thing a eulogy can actually do — not make sense of it, because it does not make sense, but let a room have her for a minute.
What you are not required to say
You do not have to describe the illness, the accident, or the last weeks. Most of the room already knows and none of them need it from you.
If she died by suicide and you would rather say so plainly than have it murmured about afterwards, a single sentence does it — that she died, that she had been unwell or had been struggling — and then leave it. Do not describe how. Many families find naming it once easier to live with than the silence, but it is entirely your decision and there is no correct answer.
Whatever you choose, tell the celebrant beforehand so nobody is surprised. And if you or anyone close to her is in a bad way, your funeral director or celebrant will know what local bereavement support exists — it is worth asking, because most people do not think to.
Two examples
For Fran Colley, who died at forty-one
About 270 words · two minutes
My daughter was always reading about something, and it was never the same something twice.
Beekeeping, for about four months. Then the Franklin expedition, exhaustively, to the point where we all knew things about it we had not agreed to know. Then Roman concrete. Then, unaccountably, competitive sheepdog trials, which she had no intention of attending.
She would ring me and open with a fact. No hello. Just: “Right, so — did you know they can’t work out how the aqueducts are still standing.”
I used to find it exhausting. I want to be honest about that, because she would want me to be. Forty-one years of unsolicited facts.
I have not had a phone call since the eleventh. That is the shape of it for me. Not the big things — I have not got to those yet — but the phone not going at ten past eight.
She was extremely funny and quite bossy and she was interested in absolutely everything except, as far as I could tell, herself.
To Priya, and to Alfie and Nora — she talked about the three of you constantly, to everyone, at length, whether or not they had asked.
Fran, love. I have looked up the aqueducts. You were right, they still don’t know.
For Rhiannon Teale, who was nineteen
About 240 words · under two minutes
There is a group chat with eleven girls in it and it has been going since Year 8, and my daughter named it, in 2019, and the name is not repeatable in a church.
They have let me read some of it this week. I want to tell you what is in there, because it is not what a parent expects.
It is mostly logistics. Who is getting the train. Whether someone has eaten. Rhiannon asking, over and over, across six years, whether people had got home.
She was the one who checked. At nineteen. Hundreds of times.
There are also four hundred photographs of her friends’ dogs and an argument about a bus timetable that ran for nine days.
To her friends — all of you, in the second and third rows — she was the one who checked, and now you will have to do it for each other, and I would like you to please actually do it.
She was nineteen. She was not going to be somebody. She already was somebody, and she was that.
Home safe, Rhi. Home safe.
A last, practical thing
Have someone in the second row with a copy. Not standing by anxiously — just holding it. It takes most of the fear out of the whole thing, whether or not you ever need them.
If it helps later, printing and marking up the pages is covered on eulogy format, and what to do if your voice goes is on how to deliver a eulogy. Neither is necessary today.
If you need more than this
Eulogy examples has six complete eulogies in different voices and lengths. Our guide to a eulogy for a cousin covers first friendships and what to say if you drifted apart. How to write a eulogy for your mother covers what is particular about eulogising a mother, including siblings and the role trap. Our step-by-step guide to writing a eulogy walks through the whole thing in six steps, from a blank page to something you can say out loud.