Short eulogy for a mother
Three complete short eulogies — one minute, ninety seconds and two minutes — plus what survives the cut when you have only a few minutes to speak about your mother.
Last updated 28 July 2026
When short is the right choice
- Several of you are speaking. Four people at two minutes is a service; four at six is an endurance test for a room that is already exhausted.
- You are not sure you can get through it. Finishing something short is better than breaking down two thirds of the way into something long — and it is a completely legitimate reason.
- There is a graveside as well as a service. Outdoors, standing, often in weather. Keep it to a minute.
- The service is at a crematorium. Slots are often 20 to 45 minutes total with another family waiting.
The rule: one idea, one story, one ending. Everything else goes.
One minute — about 130 words
For a graveside or committal, or when you are one of many speakers. A single image and nothing around it.
For Hilda Brackenbury, given by her son
About 130 words · one minute
My mother did the crossword in pen. Not out of confidence — she was wrong constantly — but because she said pencil was for people who intended to give up.
There are about forty years of those in the house, all of them in biro, a good number of them abandoned halfway through with a word written in that is definitely not a word.
She had a go. At everything, always, badly, in pen.
I am not going to keep them all. I am keeping the one from the Saturday, which is half done, and where she has written “ORCHESTRA” in a space with six letters in it.
Goodbye, Mum. It was never going to fit.
Ninety seconds — about 190 words
One object, one thing it reveals, one goodbye. Note there is no second story and no summary of her life.
For Moira Enright, given by her daughter
About 190 words · ninety seconds
My mother made the same casserole for fifty years and it was not good.
I want to be respectful but I also want to be accurate, and everyone who ate at that table knows what I am talking about. It contained whatever was in the fridge. It had range. There was a period in the nineties involving tinned peaches that we have agreed not to discuss.
But you got fed. That was the thing. If you were in that house at six o’clock you were eating, and it did not matter who you were, and she did not ask first, and there was never any discussion of whether there was enough.
My friend Deborah lived on it for most of 1998 and has just told me, outside, that she has never forgotten it.
So: not a good cook. The most generous woman I have ever known.
Thank you, Mum. There was always enough.
Two minutes — about 250 words
The longest a short eulogy should go. Room for one story with a little shape to it.
For Grace Ibekwe, given by her daughter
About 250 words · two minutes
There was a chair in my mother’s kitchen that was hers, and the rule about the chair was absolute and unwritten.
It was not a nice chair. It did not match the others. It faced the door, which I did not understand until I was about thirty, and then I understood it completely: she sat facing the door because she wanted to see who was coming in.
And people came in constantly. My mother’s kitchen had traffic. Church people, my friends, neighbours, a woman called Patience who came every Thursday for eleven years and whose surname I have never known.
Mum sat in that chair, facing the door, and dealt with whoever arrived. Advice, food, an opinion you had not requested and were going to receive anyway.
She was not gentle about it. She told my cousin he was being a fool in 2009 and she was completely right and he did not speak to her for four months.
She was still right. He is here today.
The chair is in my house now. It still does not match anything. I have put it facing the door.
Thank you, Mummy. Come in, come in.
Cutting a longer draft down
Most people arrive here with 600 words and a two-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 whole.
- Start the story at the action. Everything before “she said” is usually throat-clearing.
- Cut the roll-call of roles. Mother, grandmother, sister, friend to so many. Ten seconds, no information.
- Cut anything in the order of service. Dates, places, names of relatives.
- Replace every adjective with the example that proves it, then delete the adjective.
- Find the line that gives you a reaction and stop there.
Then read it aloud, standing, with a timer. More on the arithmetic on how long should a eulogy be, and longer examples on eulogy examples for a mother.
If you need more than this
Eulogy examples has six complete eulogies in different voices and lengths. The mother-and-daughter page is written for a daughter speaking about her mother. How to write a eulogy for your husband starts by saying you do not have to speak, and then how to keep it short enough to finish. 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.