When you are asked to give a eulogy, reading good examples of eulogies first can unlock the words you are looking for — not to copy, but to understand the shape of what you want to say. A eulogy works when it carries truth: the real person, not a polished idea of one.
The five examples below are written as genuine working tributes, each one organised by relationship. Take a section, a phrase, or just the rhythm of it. Swap the name, the specific memories, the details that made your person who they were. If you are still getting to grips with what a eulogy is and how it is structured, our guide to what a eulogy is and how to write one covers the basics clearly before you begin.
Eulogy for a parent
This example is written for a father, but the shape works equally for a mother — adjust pronouns and swap in your own specific memories.
My dad wasn't a man of many words. He showed up. At school plays, at Saturday morning football, at three in the morning when my car broke down on the A3 and I didn't know who else to call. He was just there.
His name was David, and he spent 38 years as an engineer — long enough that the firm gave him a clock when he retired, which he immediately put in the garage so he could carry on fixing things. "I'll go mad with nothing to do," he told my mum. He never went mad. He grew courgettes, badly, with great commitment, and made cheese scones that were better than they had any right to be.
He wasn't perfect. He was stubborn in the way of his generation: the kind of stubborn that meant he'd carry heavy things alone rather than ask for help, and quietly worry rather than say what was wrong. But he made me feel safe. When I was a child, I thought that was just something fathers did. I understand now what it cost him, and I'm grateful.
He loved Mum for 47 years in his particular, unsentimental way: putting the kettle on when she was stressed, recording her programmes when she forgot, sitting beside her without needing to be asked. That's love in a language I'm still learning to speak.
When I think of him, as I will every day, I'll think of Saturday mornings: Radio 4 in the kitchen, the smell of toast, the way he'd look up from his newspaper when I came in and say "ah, here she is," as if arriving home was always a good thing.
He was. He is. We were lucky to have him.
Eulogy for a spouse or partner
The ordinary things are what I miss most. Her mug on the left side of the draining board. The way she always checked the door was locked twice before she would let herself relax. The sound of her on the phone to her sister, laughing at something I couldn't hear from the other room.
Maggie and I met in 1984, at a pub in Edinburgh during a rainstorm neither of us had expected. She was annoyed about her coat. I offered her my jacket. She said no, she was fine; she clearly wasn't. Eventually I stopped offering and just sat beside her. I think that's the pattern we followed for the next 40 years.
She was a teacher for three decades, secondary school English, and her former pupils still stop me in the street to tell me what she meant to them. That she noticed them when they needed noticing. That she asked the right question at the right moment. I know the version of her they mean. It's the same one I fell in love with.
She faced these last months with a quietness that astonished everyone and surprised no one who knew her well. She wasn't brave in the way films describe. She was just herself: steady, clear-eyed, funny in moments that caught you off guard.
I have been trying to think of something wise to say and I have nothing wise. She was my person. The world is smaller without her. I am grateful I had her at all.
Eulogy for a sibling
Daniel was born eighteen months after me, and for the first few years of his life he followed me everywhere. When I asked him to stop, he told me he was practising. "Practising what?" He never answered. I think he just wanted to be wherever I was.
Later, I understood that what he was practising was being my brother. And he was very good at it.
He was the person who knew all my worst stories and told none of them. Who rang on my birthday before anyone else because he always set an alarm. Who drove two hours in a heatwave to help me move a sofa because I asked, and never mentioned it again.
He was also infuriating. He was late to almost everything. He couldn't throw anything away — there are probably six broken lamps in his flat right now, and he had a reason for all of them. He borrowed money in small amounts and always paid it back in slightly wrong amounts, as if a 17p error was a reasonable charge for his trouble. He was hopeless at arguments but somehow always ended up being right.
He died far too young. That is the plain truth of it, and I am not going to dress it up. We should have had decades more of him.
What I know is this: he was loved. Not in the abstract way, but specifically, practically, in the particular way that only a sibling can love someone — by someone who chose him, over and over, simply by turning up.
I'm so glad he was mine.
Eulogy for a grandparent
My grandmother kept a tin of biscuits on the second shelf of the kitchen cupboard. It was always full. I don't know how she did it. No matter how many we ate, the tin was always ready for the next visit.
That's Nana Joan in a sentence: the kind of woman who made sure there was always enough. Enough food, enough warmth, enough time. She never made you feel like a bother. She made you feel like the visit you were making was the one she'd been waiting for.
She was born in 1934 and lived through more change than most of us can imagine. She watched the NHS built, saw her children educated free of charge for the first time in history, and went from telegram to smartphone without ever losing her fundamental conviction that what mattered was people: their faces, their news, whether they'd eaten.
She was married to Grandad for 58 years. She used to say the secret was that she'd never expected him to be anyone he wasn't. He wasn't. It seemed to work.
She was 89 years old when she died, and she lived every one of them. There are great-grandchildren who will grow up knowing her only from photographs and what we tell them. So let me tell them this: she was steady, and warm, and she believed that feeding people was an act of love. You could do much worse than to learn from her.
Eulogy for a friend
We met when we were 23, at a job that neither of us stayed in for long. Sarah was the one who suggested leaving early on a Friday to get a drink, and the rest is 25 years of friendship.
She was one of those people who made you feel genuinely interesting. Not in a flattering way — she'd also tell you, plainly, when you were being an idiot. But she listened properly. She asked follow-up questions. She remembered, six months later, the thing you'd told her once and assumed she'd forgotten. She made you feel as though your life was worth paying attention to.
She was also impossibly funny. The kind of funny that wasn't performed — it just happened, usually at the wrong moment, usually quietly, and usually it was something you'd still be laughing about at two in the morning.
She was a good friend to many people in this room. I know that because she talked about you all, and she talked about you kindly, the way she talked about everyone she loved. She was the sort of person who built a community simply by being part of one.
I want to say something about what it means to lose a friend who chose you: not because you're family, not by accident of geography, but simply because they wanted to be in your life. That is a particular kind of love, and English has no single word for it, which I think is a flaw in the language.
She was my person. I will miss her every ordinary Tuesday for the rest of my life.
Short eulogies
Sometimes the service has a strict time limit, or you simply can't hold it together for five minutes at the lectern. A shorter tribute of two to three minutes, around 300 words, can say everything that matters. Here are two examples.
Short eulogy for a parent
My mum taught me that kindness wasn't something you switched on for special occasions. She was kind to everyone: the shop assistant, the neighbour she'd never quite got on with, the stranger on the bus who looked like they were having a bad day. Not because it was easy, but because she thought it mattered.
She was 78, and she lived quietly and well. She was loved by everyone who knew her, including me. I am grateful I was her daughter. Goodbye, Mum.
Short eulogy for a grandparent
Grandad used to say that the best thing about getting old was that nobody expected you to be in a hurry anymore. He was never in a hurry. He had time for everyone and never made you feel like a demand on his attention. He was 84, and he spent those years well. We are going to miss him very much.
How to make an example your own
No example can capture the specific person you're here to remember. That's not a flaw — it's the point. Use these as a starting place: borrow the shape, the rhythm, the structure, and then replace the details with your own.
What makes a eulogy land isn't eloquence. It's specificity. Not "she was kind" but "she always remembered how you took your tea." Not "he was funny" but "he once convinced my aunt he was a retired circus performer for an entire Christmas dinner, and she only found out when she told someone." The real details are the ones that make people cry and laugh in the same breath.
For readings to pair alongside your tribute, our selection of funeral poems offers 20 options for any kind of service, from traditional to secular. If the service includes hymns, our guide to funeral hymns covers 18 classic and contemporary choices.
After the service
The eulogy is for the funeral. But memory doesn't end there. In the weeks and months that follow, family and friends often want somewhere they can return to — to share photographs, add their own stories, or simply read what others have written about the person they've lost.
If you would like to give your loved one something permanent, a memorial page on Memoriance lets you build exactly that: a space built around the person rather than the service, for the price of a bouquet of flowers. It stays up as long as you want it to, and it grows over time as more people add their own words.
The eulogy says goodbye. A memorial lets people keep coming back.