Short eulogy examples
Five complete eulogies of one to two minutes. Each one is built differently on purpose — a short eulogy has room for exactly one idea, and the shape you choose for it matters more than the length.
Last updated 23 May 2026
When short is the right choice
A short eulogy is not a compromise. It is the correct format in more situations than people realise:
- Several people are speaking. Four speakers at two minutes is a service. Four speakers at six minutes is an endurance test for a room full of people who are already exhausted.
- You are not sure you can get through it. A shorter piece is far easier to hold together, and finishing something short is better than breaking down two thirds of the way through something long.
- Graveside or committal. People are standing, frequently in weather.
- You did not know them for very long. Two honest minutes beats six minutes of stretching.
The rule for a short eulogy: one idea, one story, one ending. Everything else goes.
1. For a mother — the things she taught
Built as a short list rather than a story. Works well when there is no single defining scene but many small consistent ones.
For Delia Marchetti
About 210 words · a little under two minutes
My mother did not give advice. She would have said advice was for people who liked the sound of their own voice. She taught by doing things in front of you until you picked them up.
From my mother I learned: that you warm the pot first. That you never arrive anywhere empty-handed, even a hospital. That if someone is crying you make them a sandwich before you ask them anything.
That you can be furious with somebody and still drive them to the station.
That there is no such thing as a small kindness, and that anyone who says there is has probably never received one.
I am forty-six and I still catch myself warming the pot. I did it on Tuesday, the morning after, without thinking, and then I had to sit down on the kitchen floor for a while.
She is going to keep turning up like that, I think. In the small things. In the way I do them.
Thank you, Mum. I was paying attention.
2. For a grandfather — a place rather than a person
Anchored to one location. Very effective for someone whose whole character lived in a particular room, workshop, garden or car.
For Bill Trescothick
About 230 words · about two minutes
My grandad had an allotment for fifty-one years. Plot 14. If you wanted to speak to him about anything serious, that is where it happened, and you had to be prepared to hold something while he talked.
I got the news about my A-levels on plot 14, holding a tray of seedlings. I told him I was getting divorced on plot 14, holding a fork. He did not stop what he was doing either time. He just said, after a while, “Right,” and then, later, something useful.
I understand now that this was deliberate. He knew that some things are easier to say sideways, to a man who is looking at a runner bean. He gave people that. He gave it to a lot of us, quietly, for decades.
The council have written to us about the plot. We have until March.
My brother and I are going to take it on, and we are going to be terrible at it. The onions will be a disgrace. But there will be somewhere to go and stand and hold something, and I think that is the part that mattered.
See you on 14, Grandad.
3. For a friend — the thing they were wrong about
Affectionate contradiction. A good shape when the person was funny, or when you want warmth without sentimentality.
For Marguerite “Mo” Baptiste
About 200 words · under two minutes
Mo was certain she was a private person. She said it constantly. She said it to strangers.
She was not a private person. Mo told a woman at a bus stop in Croydon about my fertility treatment before she told me she had mentioned it. She once briefed an entire hen party on her sister ’s mortgage. She believed, sincerely, that she was discreet.
But I have been thinking about why she got that so wrong, and I think it is because she genuinely could not see the line between people. Everyone was already in. If she knew you for eleven minutes you were hers, and your business was hers, and — this is the part that counts — her business was yours, immediately, in enormous and unnecessary detail.
There are about sixty of us here who were let straight in like that.
Mo, you were the least private person I have ever met, and being let in was the honour of my life.
4. For a brother — written as a letter
Addressed to him throughout rather than about him. Intimate, and it removes the strain of trying to sound like a public speaker.
For Owen Fairhurst
About 190 words · under two minutes
I am going to talk to you rather than about you, if that is all right. It is easier and you would find the other thing embarrassing.
You were three years older and you never once used it against me, which I have since learned is rare. You let me come along. You let me come along to things where I was plainly a nuisance, for years, and you never made me feel it.
I did not thank you for that. It did not occur to me that it was a choice you were making until I watched my own two do the opposite to each other last summer.
I am going to have to tell them about you now. I have not worked out how.
I keep picking up the phone. Forty-one years is a long time to learn a habit.
Thanks for letting me come along, Owen.
5. For an aunt — in her own words
Built around the things she said. Almost writes itself if the person had strong verbal habits, and it puts their voice in the room repeatedly.
For Auntie Sylvie
About 175 words · around a minute and a half
“Well, I’m not being funny, but.”
Anyone who knew my aunt is now bracing, because that sentence never once preceded anything reasonable. It was the sound of a verdict arriving.
“I’m not being funny, but that hat is a mistake.” “I’m not being funny, but he’s not going to stay, is he.” And, in 1998, to a GP: “I’m not being funny, but I don’t think you’ve read the notes.” She was right about that one, and she dined out on it for twenty-six years.
She was right about most of them, actually. That was the trouble with Sylvie.
I would give a great deal to be told the truth like that one more time.
I’m not being funny, Auntie Sylvie. But we are going to miss you enormously.
How to cut a long draft to two minutes
Most people arrive here with 700 words and a three minute slot. Cut in this order:
- Choose one story and delete the others. Not shorten — delete. Three stories in miniature are weaker than one told properly.
- Start the story at the action. Everything before “he said” or “she walked in” is usually throat-clearing.
- Cut the roll-call. “Mother, grandmother, sister, aunt, friend to so many.” Ten seconds, no information.
- Cut anything printed in the order of service. Dates, places, job titles.
- Cut every adjective you can. “She was kind and generous and warm and funny” is four words that mean less than one specific thing she did.
- Find your real ending and stop there. The line that gives you a reaction when you read it aloud is almost never the last line you wrote.
Then read it out loud with a timer, standing up. Reading in your head runs at roughly twice speaking pace and will tell you something comforting and wrong.
More to read
Our collection of eulogy examples has six complete eulogies in different voices and lengths. Our annotated sample eulogy takes one eulogy apart paragraph by paragraph, then shows it again at two minutes. 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. Our page on how long a eulogy should be works out the words-to-minutes arithmetic and what to cut first.