Writing a eulogy for your son

Before anything else. There is no expectation that a parent speaks at their child’s funeral. Most do not. Nobody in that room will think anything about it except that they are sorry.

His brother can speak. His sister, his closest friend, an aunt, the celebrant. Any of them will do it if you ask, and most will be glad to be given something to do.

There is also a middle way that people rarely mention: write what you want said, and hand it to someone else to read out in your name. You get to say it. You do not have to stand up.

If you do want to speak, everything below assumes one thing — that it should be much shorter than you are imagining.

A minute. Two at the very most.

Not because there is little to say. Because there is far too much, and because the longer you are up there the more of it arrives at once. A parent trying to hold thirty years in front of a room is being asked to do something that is not possible.

One thing about him. One small, specific, true thing. Then stop.

Write the last sentence out on a separate card and put it in your pocket, and learn it, so that if everything else goes you can still finish. Ask someone sitting near the front to hold a copy, and tell them beforehand that they may need to take over. Then it is not a failure if you stop. It is a plan working.

People will say he was taken too soon. They mean it kindly and it is true and it is also, if you build the whole eulogy on it, a slightly cruel shape — because it turns his life into a thing that did not get completed.

He was complete. He was entirely himself for the whole time he was here, whether that was six years or forty. He did not need more of it to become a person; he already was one, a very specific one, with opinions and habits and a particular way of coming through a door.

That is what a eulogy can do that nothing else can. Not account for the loss — nothing accounts for it — but put him in the room, exactly as he was, for a minute.

You are allowed to say it is unbearable and unfair. Say it in one sentence if you want to, and then go and describe him.

Whatever happened, you are not obliged to describe it. Not the illness, not the accident, not the last weeks. The room does not need it and most of them already know.

If he died by suicide and you would rather it were said plainly than murmured about afterwards, one sentence is enough — many families find that easier than the silence. Say that he died, and that he had been ill, or that he was struggling, and leave it there. Do not describe how. Then spend the rest of the time on who he was, which is the part that is actually about him.

Whatever you decide, decide it before the day rather than at the lectern, and tell whoever is running the service what you have chosen. If you or anyone close to you is struggling badly, your funeral director or celebrant can usually point you to local bereavement support, and it is worth asking them.

Both are short. The first is for a grown son; the second is for a small boy, and if that is not your situation you may want to skip it.

Someone should be ready to step in — not standing by anxiously, just quietly holding a copy in the second row. It costs nothing and it takes most of the fear out of it.

If it helps to see how the pages themselves should be printed, that is on eulogy format, and what to do if your voice goes is on how to deliver a eulogy. But you do not need to read either of those today.

Eulogy examples has six complete eulogies in different voices and lengths. Our page on a eulogy for a daughter is for a parent, and begins by saying you are not required to do this. How to write a eulogy for your cousin covers first friendships and what to say if you drifted apart. How to write a eulogy walks through the whole thing in six steps, from a blank page to something you can say out loud.