Memorial service speech examples
A memorial service is a different occasion from a funeral: no coffin, more time has passed, and often a different set of people in the room. Three complete speeches for three of those situations.
Last updated 2 September 2026
What makes a memorial different
Three things change once the funeral is behind you, and all of them affect what you write.
- The room is less raw. People can listen properly. You can be more detailed, funnier, and more honest than you could have been in the first week.
- Not everyone was at the funeral. Some will have been abroad, or unwell, or not close enough to be told in time. Do not assume shared knowledge — a sentence of orientation helps.
- It is often a different circle. A workplace, a club, a town they left thirty years ago. If the family are present, they are the guests, and much of what you say should be aimed at them.
1. A memorial some months after the funeral
For Warren Tolley, four months on
About 430 words · about three minutes
Some of you were at the funeral in March and some of you were not, and I know at least four people here found out too late, so I want to start by saying you have not missed anything. This is the part that matters.
My uncle Warren repaired televisions for a living until about 1998, when that stopped being a job, and he never entirely accepted that it had stopped being a job.
He kept doing it. Not commercially — he simply carried on repairing things for people, in his shed, for free, for another twenty-seven years. Toasters. Lawnmowers. A karaoke machine. My neighbour’s robot vacuum, which he found personally offensive and fixed anyway.
He was not sentimental about objects. He was, I think, quietly outraged by waste. He came from a family with nothing and he could not watch a working thing be thrown out because a part had failed.
Four months on, I will tell you what I have actually noticed, which is not the big absence. It is that things break now and stay broken. I have a lamp in my hallway that has not worked since February and I keep walking past it thinking, well, I’ll take that round to Warren.
That is the shape grief takes after the funeral, I think. Not the ceremony. Just a lot of small moments where the person is supposed to be and is not.
He was also stubborn, frequently wrong about politics, and he gave unsolicited advice about cars to people who had not mentioned cars.
The shed is still there. My aunt has not touched it and nobody is hurrying her.
I am going to learn to fix the lamp. It is going to take me a very long time and it is going to be done badly.
2. A workplace memorial
The family are in the room and this is the one chance to tell them what their person was like at work. Nothing internal, no jargon, no jokes that need context.
For Ingrid Halvorsen, at a memorial held at her office
About 380 words · three minutes
To Ingrid’s family — thank you for coming to this. I know it is odd to be in an office on a Thursday afternoon for this reason, and I want to tell you something you may not have seen, because we had her for nine hours a day for eleven years.
Ingrid was the person who said the difficult thing in meetings.
That sounds small. It is not small. In every organisation there is a moment where a room has silently agreed on something that is wrong, and everybody knows, and nobody says it because it is easier not to.
Ingrid said it. Every time. In a completely calm voice, usually beginning “Can I just check something.”
It cost her. I want to be honest about that in front of you. She was described as difficult by people who should have known better, and she was passed over at least twice, and she knew exactly why and carried on doing it anyway.
There are three decisions this company made in the last decade that would have gone badly wrong without her, and none of them have her name on them.
The other thing, and then I will stop. She was extremely kind to new people. Every single person she trained is here today. She took them for coffee in the first week and told them, quietly, how things actually worked — which is a different thing from the induction.
She was funny, dry, and completely unimpressed by seniority.
To her family: she was respected here in a way she would have been embarrassed to hear described. We are going to miss her enormously.
Can I just check something. We are all going to try to be the person who says it.
3. At a scattering of ashes
Short, outdoors, people standing on uneven ground and often in wind. Say why this place and stop.
For Bernice Chu, at the headland
About 160 words · one minute
Mum asked for here, and she was very specific, and she wrote it down twice in case we lost it.
She came to this headland the week she arrived in this country in 1979, because somebody at the hostel told her it was worth the bus fare. She was twenty-two, she knew nobody, and she said it was the first time since leaving Hong Kong that she had not felt frightened.
She came back most years. She brought us. She brought her grandchildren, who complained about the walk, as we had.
So this is not a random beautiful place. This is the place where she stopped being afraid.
We are going to do this now, and then there is tea in the car.
Bye, Mum.
Before the day
- Agree how many people are speaking and for how long — memorials drift without it.
- Outdoors, write shorter sentences and plan to be much louder. See how to deliver a eulogy.
- More on the informal end of this on celebration of life speech examples.
Also on this site
Funeral speech examples separates the five different speeches given at a funeral, which are not all eulogies. How to write a celebration of life speech is for the event nobody is running, where your speech is also the structure. Christian eulogy examples is about showing faith through habit rather than asserting it. 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.