How to deliver a eulogy

1. Practise out loud, standing, three times. Read the whole eulogy aloud at full speaking volume, standing up, with a timer. Not in your head. Three full run-throughs is enough — beyond that you begin to flatten it.
2. Find the sentence that undoes you. There will be one. Read it aloud repeatedly until it loses some of its charge, or rewrite it shorter. Never leave your most difficult sentence unrehearsed.
3. Walk up slowly and set your pages down. Do not start speaking as you arrive. Put the pages on the lectern, square them, plant both feet, breathe all the way out. The room will wait, and the pause reads as composure.
4. Speak to one face at the back. Pick a person near the back of the room and talk to them. Addressing one person is far easier than addressing a crowd, and it naturally raises your volume and slows your pace.
5. Go slower than feels right. Nerves speed everyone up. Aim for a pace that feels almost too slow to you — that is roughly normal to the room. Take the pauses you marked, even when the silence feels long.
6. If your voice goes, stop and breathe out. Put both hands flat on the lectern, breathe out fully twice, take a drink if there is one, then restart from the beginning of the paragraph rather than mid-sentence.

Three full read-throughs out loud is the right amount. People are often told to practise “dozens of times,” and that advice actively harms a eulogy: past about five, delivery flattens into recitation and you lose the thing that makes it move a room.

• Stand up and use full volume. Muttering it at a desk tells you almost nothing about how it will go.
• Time it, twice. The first read is always faster than reality. Add fifteen seconds for walking up and settling.
• Practise once in front of one person. Not for feedback — to find out what happens to your voice when someone is watching. Far better to discover that in a kitchen.
• Do not practise on the morning. One quiet read of the first and last lines is enough. A full rehearsal hours before uses up composure you will want later.

• Feet apart, weight even. Locked knees and weight on one hip both cause swaying, which you will not feel and the room will see.
• Hands on the pages or flat on the lectern. Do not grip the edges. Gripping transmits the shake up your arms.
• Look up at the ends of paragraphs, not mid-sentence. That is what the bolded first words on each paragraph are for — they let you find your place again instantly.
• Pick your one face before you stand up. Choose someone near the back who is composed. Not your mother. Not their partner.
• Do not look at the coffin while speaking, unless you have deliberately chosen to at the very end.

First, the honest part: you may cry, and it is fine. You are at a funeral. Weeping there is the correct response to the situation, not a lapse in composure, and every person in the room is on your side. Most of the fear people carry into this is fear of an embarrassment that does not actually exist.

What to do, in order, if your voice goes:

1. Stop. Do not push through — pushing through is what turns a wobble into a collapse.
2. Put both hands flat on the lectern and breathe out all the way, twice. Crying tightens the in-breath; it is the out-breath that settles you.
3. Drink some water if it is there. Ask for a moment if you want one — “give me a second” is a fine thing to say out loud.
4. Restart at the beginning of the paragraph, not where you stopped. You need a run-up.
5. If you cannot continue, look at your second reader. That is what they are for. Handing it over is the plan working.

• Eat something beforehand. People forget, and a shaking voice is sometimes just low blood sugar.
• Sit at the end of a row. Shuffling past six people while holding pages is a bad way to begin.
• Keep tissues in the hand you are not using. In your pocket is too far away.
• Have a very short first sentence. An easy win in the first five seconds changes the whole thing.
• Do not add anything at the end. Say your last line, square your pages, and walk. The urge to fill the silence is strong and the silence is doing real work.

For how the pages themselves should be printed and marked up, see eulogy format.

How to write a eulogy walks through the whole thing in six steps, from a blank page to something you can say out loud. How long should a eulogy be works out the words-to-minutes arithmetic and what to cut first. Eulogy examples has six complete eulogies in different voices and lengths. Our set of fill-in eulogy templates gives you four fill-in templates, each shown blank and then completed.