How to write a eulogy for your father
The difficulties here are different from the ones people expect. Not finding words — finding the right material, and getting past the version of him that fits on a CV.
Last updated 1 July 2026
The job-and-hobbies trap
Fathers get eulogised through their externals more than anyone else. He was a plumber for thirty years. He supported Wolves. He loved his garden, his motorbike, his dog. He was a proud grandfather of six.
Those facts are easy to reach for, which is exactly the problem — they are the things you would put on a form. A room can hear all of it and still not know what it was like to be near him.
The way out is to go one level down. Not that he loved his garden, but that he would not let anyone else weed it and got genuinely short with you if you tried. Not that he supported Wolves, but that he could not watch the last ten minutes and would go and stand in the kitchen.
The behaviour is the man. The category is just the heading it sits under.
Four things that are specifically hard about this one
“He wasn’t one for emotions”
An enormously common sentence, usually true, and it becomes a trap — because it can leave you feeling you have nothing to describe.
You do. He said it in actions, and the actions are more specific and more moving than any declaration would have been. He drove four hours without being asked. He turned up at your flat with a toolbox he had packed the night before. He paid for something and never mentioned it, and you only found out afterwards.
Do not claim he was secretly very expressive. Describe what he actually did and let the room draw the conclusion. They will, and they will do it faster than you expect.
Sons and the pressure to hold it together
Many men speaking about their fathers are carrying an unspoken expectation to get through it composedly, sometimes from the man himself. It is worth saying plainly: nobody in that room requires that of you, and a father who would have wanted you not to cry would also not have wanted you to be frightened of a lectern.
Practical version: keep sentences short, rehearse the difficult paragraph until it loses charge, and hand someone a second copy.
Unfinished business
Fathers and children leave more unsaid than most relationships manage. If there is a conversation you never had, you have three options: leave it out entirely, name it in one sentence and move on, or make it the subject.
What does not work is a eulogy that quietly argues with him. If you notice yourself defending a position, put the draft down for a day.
Two different fathers, forty years apart
The man who raised you at ten and the man you knew at forty are often barely the same person — men frequently soften considerably, and grandchildren tend to meet a version their parents never got.
Rather than choosing between them, say so. “My children knew a much gentler man than I did, and I am glad about it” is honest, generous, and it lets the whole room in.
Where to find the material
- What did he say when he answered the phone?
- What was in his car?
- What did he wear at weekends for twenty years?
- What was he unreasonable about?
- What did he refuse help with?
- What did he do when he was pleased with you?
- What did he do that he thought nobody noticed?
- What did he teach you without ever sitting you down?
Two complete examples
For Terry Mullane, given by his son
About 500 words · roughly four minutes
My father and I had an argument in 2011 about a fence, and we never actually finished it.
It was not about the fence. It was ostensibly about the fence. It ran for about nine days and it ended, as all of our arguments ended, with neither of us conceding anything and both of us going to look at something in the garage.
That was how we did it. I have talked to a few people this week who assumed we must have been close in a talkative way, and we were not. We were close in the way where you drive somewhere together for two hours and say eleven words and both consider it a good day out.
What he gave me, he gave me sideways.
When I failed my exams at eighteen he did not sit me down. He came into my room at about eleven at night, put a job application on the end of the bed for a firm in Rugeley, and said, “That’s not a suggestion, it’s an option.” And then he left. I worked there for two years. It was the making of me and we never once discussed it.
When my daughter was born he was in the hospital car park for four hours and would not come in, because he said it was not his moment. He had brought a car seat. He had fitted it and taken it out twice to make sure.
He was difficult. He was properly difficult, and I am not going to improve him now that he cannot object. He could not apologise. He thought counselling was for people with too much time. He held on to a bad opinion of my brother-in-law for eleven years on evidence that would not have troubled a magistrate.
And I would give a very great deal to be arguing with him about a fence right now.
Here is the thing I worked out, too late, and I want to say it out loud because he never would. The arguments were the conversation. That was him talking to me. Nine days about a fence is nine days of a man who does not want to stop speaking to you.
Dad — you were wrong about the fence. It was on our side. I have got the deeds and I have measured it and I was right.
I would have let you have it, though. If I’d known.
For Abdou Diallo, given by his daughter
About 440 words · about three and a half minutes
My father drove the same route for twenty-six years, and I want to take you along it, because I think it explains him better than anything I could say directly.
Out of the house at ten to five in the morning. He never used an alarm — he woke up at half four for a quarter of a century by some method he could not explain and we all found slightly unnerving.
Then the garage on Fenton Street, where he bought a coffee he did not like from a man called Wes, every morning, for years, because Wes was on his own overnight and my father had decided at some point that this mattered.
Then the depot. Then eleven hours. Then back.
And here is the part I did not know until I was twenty-four. He came home the long way. Not the dual carriageway — through Wickford, which added twenty minutes at the end of an eleven-hour shift.
He did it so that he arrived after five o’clock. Because before five, my mother was still at work and we were on our own, and he had worked out that if he came in at five past, we would have had the house to ourselves for exactly one hour, which he thought teenagers were owed.
Twenty minutes, every day, for years, so that his children could have an hour without a parent in the house.
He never mentioned it. My mother told me, in a completely ordinary voice, while making tea, as though it were not the most extraordinary thing I had ever heard.
He was not a soft man. He had rules and there were a lot of them, and some of them made no sense, and one of them was about shoes in a way we still do not understand. He could be very stern and he did not explain himself, ever, to anybody.
But he thought about us constantly, in silence, in a van, for twenty-six years.
I drive past Fenton Street sometimes. Wes retired years ago. The garage is a coffee shop now, which Dad would have found ridiculous.
Thank you for the long way round, Baba. We never knew.
Before you finish
- Read it aloud, standing, with a timer — see how long should a eulogy be.
- Check for the argument. If any paragraph is defending a position, rewrite or cut it.
- Give a second copy to someone near the front who can finish it if you cannot. More on the day itself on how to deliver a eulogy.
If you need more than this
Our collection of eulogy examples has six complete eulogies in different voices and lengths. Our set of eulogy examples for a father has three complete eulogies for a father, including a sudden death and a stepfather. Eulogy examples for a mother, by situation covers the harder cases: a long illness, a distant relationship, and a two-minute slot. How to write a eulogy walks through the whole thing in six steps, from a blank page to something you can say out loud.