How to write a eulogy for your grandfather
There is usually a gap between the grandfather you knew and the father your parent knew. Understanding that gap is most of what makes this eulogy good.
Last updated 19 July 2026
Two different men, thirty years apart
This is the thing to understand before you write anything. The man you knew is very often not the man your parent grew up with.
Grandfathers frequently soften enormously. A man who was strict, absent, working six days a week, or simply not very available to his own children can arrive at seventy with time, patience and no disciplinary responsibility at all — and grandchildren get the benefit of all three.
If you write a eulogy about the gentle man who let you win at draughts, and your father grew up with someone considerably harder, your father will sit through it recognising nobody.
You do not have to resolve that. You just have to acknowledge it, and one sentence does it:
I know the grandfather I had was a different man from the father my mum had. I’ve thought about that a lot this week. I got the easy version, and I’m grateful for it.
That single line will mean more to your parent than anything else in the speech.
Four things that are specifically hard about this one
The CV problem
Grandfathers get reduced to externals more than anyone: the trade, the service record, the team, the allotment. All easy to list, none of it telling the room what he was like to be near.
Go one level down. Not that he was a joiner for forty years, but that he could not walk past a badly hung door in someone else’s house without commenting.
The man who would not talk about himself
Extremely common, particularly with anyone who served, worked down a mine, or emigrated. If he deflected every question for sixty years, that deflection is a real and describable characteristic — not an absence of material.
It is also worth asking an older relative now, while you can. There is frequently one fact nobody under fifty knows, and it will be the best thirty seconds of the eulogy.
If he was strict
Do not sand it off. A eulogy that turns a hard man into a twinkly one is unrecognisable to the people who knew him best, and they are sitting in the front two rows.
The strongest version names the strictness and then finds the exact moment it gave way — the one time he was gentle, or proud, or wrong and admitted it. That contrast does more than any amount of warmth.
Great-grandchildren
If there are small children who knew him, one line about what they called him or what he let them do is worth including. It gives the room the last chapter, and it is often the only genuinely light moment available.
Where to find the material
- What was in his shed, garage, or coat pockets?
- What did he refuse to pay for?
- What did he watch, and did he actually watch it or sleep?
- What did he say when you did something well?
- What did he never talk about?
- What did he let you do that your parents did not?
- What did he keep repairing rather than replacing?
- What was he like at twenty-five? (Ask someone who knows.)
Two complete examples
For Alf Ridding, given by his grandson
About 460 words · roughly three and a half minutes
My grandfather had the worst handwriting of any human being I have ever encountered, and he was completely unapologetic about it for ninety-one years.
It was not untidy. It was a code. Individual letters had simply been abandoned somewhere around 1958 and replaced with a long horizontal line containing occasional events.
We have his notebooks. He kept notebooks for sixty years — small ones, spiral bound, in the pocket of whatever coat he was wearing — and they are largely illegible, and we have been going through them all week with a magnifying glass like a family of amateur codebreakers.
Here is what is in them, as far as we can tell. Weather. Registration numbers of cars he did not like the look of. What he paid for things, with commentary. The phrase “shocking” appears at least forty times.
And then, occasionally, without any warning, something like this, which is from March 1994 and which my aunt decoded on Tuesday: “Susan rang. Sounded low. Rang back later, better.”
That is my mother. She was going through a bad year and she did not know he had noticed. He noticed. He wrote it down. He rang back.
There are dozens of these. All of us are in there somewhere, in a line of code, being quietly kept an eye on by a man who never once said anything about it to any of us.
He was not an easy grandfather in the modern sense. He did not play. He was not demonstrative and he had firm views about children being quiet. My mother will tell you he was considerably harder on her than he ever was on me, and she is right, and I got the easy version.
But he was watching all of it, the whole time, in biro, in a coat pocket.
We are keeping the notebooks. We are never going to read most of them.
Thank you, Grandad. Sounded low. Rang back later, better.
For Ramesh Iyer, given by his granddaughter
About 430 words · about three minutes
There is a piece of music that will be played at the end of this service and I want to explain it first, because otherwise it will just sound like a nice raga to most of you.
My grandfather played it every morning. Not listened — played, on a cassette, then a CD, then, from about 2015, on a phone he did not trust and held at arm’s length like it was going to bite him.
Same piece. Every morning. For as long as anyone can remember.
I asked him about it once, when I was maybe nineteen and in the phase of asking my family direct questions they did not want. And he did what he always did, which was to answer a different, easier question in a very pleasant voice, and change the subject to whether I had eaten.
My father told me on Sunday. It was playing in the house in Chennai the morning he left in 1968. He was twenty-two. He did not come back for eleven years, and by then both his parents had died.
Fifty-eight years of playing the same four minutes of music every morning, and he never told a single one of us why.
I have thought about that all week and what I have landed on is this: he was not sad about it. That is the part I want to get right. He was not sitting there mourning for fifty-eight years — he was extremely cheerful, he was terrible at chess and played it constantly, he laughed at things that were not funny. He just also, every morning, for four minutes, went home.
And then made everybody breakfast.
I think you can carry something for a very long time without it making you heavy. I did not know that was possible until I found out he had been doing it my whole life, in the next room, at seven in the morning.
Thatha — we are going to play it now. All of us, this time.
Before you finish
- Ask your parent to read it, if they can. They are burying their father and they have the greater claim on how he is described.
- Ask one older relative for a fact you do not have. It is usually the best line in the speech.
- Read it aloud with a timer — see how long should a eulogy be — and print it large, per eulogy format.
If you need more than this
Eulogy examples has six complete eulogies in different voices and lengths. Eulogy examples for a grandmother has three complete eulogies for a grandmother, including one who raised the speaker. How to write a eulogy for your sister covers the rivalry you are allowed to admit to, and the childhood only you remember. 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.