How to Write a Eulogy for a Son: A Guide With Examples

There is no version of this that is easy, and there is no right way to do it. If you are reading this, you are preparing to stand in front of people and talk about your son, and almost certainly you never imagined being asked to.

So before anything else: you do not owe anyone a performance. A eulogy for a son can be four sentences. It can be read from a folded piece of paper. It can be handed to someone else to read if your voice gives out partway through. Everyone in that room already knows what this costs you.

What follows is a structure that has helped a lot of families, two full examples you are welcome to borrow from, and some practical notes for the day itself.

What a eulogy for a son actually needs to do

It does not need to summarize his whole life. It does not need to explain his death, or make sense of it, or find a lesson in it.

A eulogy only needs to do one thing: let the people in that room see him for a few minutes. Not the facts of him — the dates, the schools, the job titles — but the particular person. The way he said your name when he wanted something. The thing he always did with his hands when he was thinking. The joke he never stopped telling.

That is the whole job. Specific beats grand, every time.

Gathering what you want to say

Rather than starting with a blank page, start with a list. Sit with a notebook, or your phone, or a sibling who remembers things you have forgotten, and answer whatever you can:

• What did he love so much that you teased him about it?
• What was he like as a small child, and how much of that stayed?
• What did he do that made you laugh when you did not want to laugh?
• Who did he take care of?
• What is a sentence he said often enough that you can hear it in his voice?
• What did he teach you — not a moral lesson, just something you know because of him?

Write badly and quickly. You are not drafting yet, you are collecting. Most people find that two or three items on this list turn out to be the whole eulogy.

If you are too tired to do this alone — and that is very common — ask two or three people who loved him to send you one memory each. You will have more than enough.

A simple structure that holds up

Four parts, in this order:

Open plainly. Say who you are and what you are about to do. "I am David's mother, and I want to tell you a few things about him." That is enough. No throat-clearing required.

Tell one or two stories. Not a list of qualities — a story. A single afternoon. A single conversation. Stories carry character better than adjectives do, and they give the room something to hold onto.

Say what he meant. One short passage on what he brought into your life, or what you will carry forward. This is usually the hardest part to say out loud, so keep it brief and write it exactly as you want to say it.

Close simply. One line. "I will miss him every day of my life." "He was a good man and he was mine." "We were so lucky to have him." A simple closing line is easier to get through than a complicated one, which matters more than you might expect.

Example: a eulogy for a young son

This one is written for a child. It is deliberately short.

"I'm Theo's dad. I'm going to keep this brief, because he had a short life and I don't want to use a lot of words on a boy who only ever used the ones he needed.

Theo was four. He was obsessed with the garbage truck. Every Tuesday morning he was at the front window in his pajamas waiting for it, and when it came he would do this full-body wave with both arms, and after about a month the driver started honking for him. For the rest of his life, that was the best part of his week — a man he never met honking a horn at him.

He gave terrible, crushing hugs. He put his whole head into them. He did not care at all whether you were ready.

I don't have anything wise to say about why he isn't here. I only know that for four years we got to be the people he came running to, and that was the great privilege of my life. Thank you for loving him with us.

Honk for him on Tuesdays."

Example: a eulogy for an adult son

"I'm Marcus's mother. Thank you all for being here — some of you have come a very long way, and he would have found that embarrassing and then been quietly thrilled about it.

Marcus was thirty-four. He was a terrible cook who refused to accept this about himself. He hosted dinner constantly. For about six years running he made the same chicken dish, which was never quite done, and we all ate it, every time, because the point was never the chicken. The point was that he wanted his people in one room. He kept doing that his whole adult life — collecting people, making sure the ones on the edges got invited.

He called me every Sunday. Not for anything. He would narrate his week, mostly complaints about his landlord, and I would say almost nothing, and we would both hang up in a better mood. Thirty-four years old and still calling his mother to complain about a radiator.

What he gave me was the thing he gave everyone: the feeling of being thoroughly paid attention to. He noticed what you said. He brought it up months later. In a world full of people half-listening, my son listened all the way down.

I don't know how to be someone whose son has died. I expect I will be learning that for the rest of my life. But I know I would rather have had him for thirty-four years than not have had him at all, and that is the only arithmetic that has ever made sense to me.

Sunday is going to be very quiet. Call your mothers."

When the loss does not make sense

If his death was sudden, or violent, or the end of a long struggle with addiction or illness or his own mind, you may be dreading the gap between the son you are describing and what people know about how he died.

You do not have to address it. A eulogy is not a record; it is a tribute, and leaving something out is not a lie.

If you do want to name it, one sentence is almost always enough, and it works best when it stays on his side. "He fought something hard for a long time, and he fought it bravely, and it is not the thing I will remember about him." Then go back to him. The room will follow you there gratefully.

Practical notes for the day

• Print it large. Fourteen-point type or bigger, double-spaced, one side of the page only — shuffling pages is harder than you think when your hands are shaking.
• Read it out loud beforehand, at least once, somewhere private. You will find the lines that break you, and you can decide what to do about them.
• Ask someone to stand by. Give a copy to a sibling, a friend, the officiant. Tell them: if I stop, come up and finish it. Knowing there is a net makes the walk to the front much easier.
• Pausing is allowed. Silence in a room full of people who loved him is not an awkward silence. Take the water. Take the minute.
• Keep it to three to five minutes. Four hundred to seven hundred words. Shorter is kinder to you and lands harder anyway.

If words are not the only way you want to remember him

Some parents find that the eulogy, however well it goes, says a fraction of what they meant. That is not a failure of writing. There are things about a son that do not fit into prose read aloud on a difficult morning.

Families sometimes find that music carries what a speech could not — a song written from his actual story, his sayings, the Tuesday morning garbage truck, the undercooked chicken. That is the work we do at Their Life Song: a custom song made from what a family tells us about the person they lost, for the service or for long afterward. It is not a replacement for standing up and speaking about him. For some families it is the thing they play on his birthday for years, when the eulogy has been folded away in a drawer.

Whatever you decide, the eulogy you write will be enough. It is being spoken by someone who knew him before anyone else did, and nothing you could say would be the wrong thing.

Related reading

• Songs About Losing a Son
• Eulogy Examples: Short Tributes for Every Relationship
• Gentle, Meaningful Memorial Ideas for a Child Who Died