Songs About Losing a Grandmother

A grandmother's funeral is often the first one a family plans together as adults. The grandchildren are grown. The stories have had decades to settle. And somewhere in the middle of choosing readings and printing programs, someone asks the question that stops the room: what should we play?

It is a harder question than it sounds, because a grandmother is rarely one thing. She might be the woman who taught you to make biscuits and the woman who kept a rosary in her purse and the woman who danced to Sam Cooke in her kitchen at seventy-eight. A single song has to carry all of that.

What follows is a starting place, not a ranking. Play a few of these when you are alone first. The right one usually announces itself.

Songs actually written about a grandmother

There are fewer of these than you might expect, which is part of why the good ones land so hard.

• "Grandma's Hands" — Bill Withers. Two minutes long, and it does more with her hands than most eulogies do with a whole life. Clapping in church, picking up a baby, warning a boy off the wrong path.
• "Marjorie" — Taylor Swift. Written about her own grandmother, and unusual in that it is mostly about regret — all the questions she wishes she had asked. Many grandchildren recognize themselves in it.
• "Supermarket Flowers" — Ed Sheeran. Written from his mother's point of view after his grandmother died, in the quiet of clearing out a hospital room. Gentle, domestic, devastating.
• "Grandpa (Tell Me 'Bout the Good Old Days)" — The Judds. Written toward a grandfather but sung by many families for either. It is a song about wanting the old world explained before it goes.
• "To Where You Are" — Josh Groban. Groban has said this one grew out of losing his own grandmother. It suits a service that needs something soaring rather than spare.
• "The House That Built Me" — Miranda Lambert. Not about a death at all, but about standing in the house where you were raised. If she was the keeper of that house, it will not feel like a stretch.

Hymns and songs of faith

For a great many grandmothers, this is the section that matters. If she sang in a choir, kept a hymnal on the piano, or had a favorite she hummed while she worked, that hymn will carry more weight than anything on the radio.

• "Amazing Grace"
• "How Great Thou Art"
• "In the Garden"
• "It Is Well With My Soul"
• "Precious Memories"
• "His Eye Is on the Sparrow"
• "Softly and Tenderly"
• "I'll Fly Away" — often placed at the end, when a service is meant to lift rather than close
• "Just a Closer Walk with Thee"
• "Go Rest High on That Mountain" — Vince Gill
• "Ave Maria"

If you are not sure which hymn was hers, ask the oldest person in the family before you ask anyone else. Someone usually knows.

Songs from her own years

One of the kindest things a service can do is play music that was hers before it was anyone else's — the songs that were on the radio when she was twenty, in love, and had no idea how the story would go. These tend to make older mourners cry and younger ones understand something new about her.

• "Unforgettable" — Nat King Cole
• "I'll Be Seeing You" — Billie Holiday
• "Sentimental Journey" — Doris Day
• "Que Sera, Sera" — Doris Day
• "Moon River" — Andy Williams
• "What a Wonderful World" — Louis Armstrong
• "You Are My Sunshine"
• "In My Life" — The Beatles
• "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" — Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, for a lighter, warmer version
• "Bridge Over Troubled Water" — Simon & Garfunkel

Songs for the missing, afterward

These are less for the service and more for the drive home, the first holiday, the morning you reach for the phone before you remember.

• "One Sweet Day" — Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men
• "Please Remember Me" — Tim McGraw
• "Landslide" — Fleetwood Mac
• "Songbird" — Fleetwood Mac
• "See You Again" — Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth
• "Forever Young" — Bob Dylan, or the Rod Stewart version
• "The Wind Beneath My Wings" — Bette Midler
• "I Look to You" — Whitney Houston
• "Time to Say Goodbye" — Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman
• "Hallelujah" — Leonard Cohen, though it is worth reading the lyrics through once before choosing it

Choosing between them

A few things that help when the list is still too long:

• Match the song to the moment, not the whole service. A slideshow wants something warm and instrumental enough to talk over. A final walk-out wants something with lift. The moment of sitting down at the start wants something quiet.
• Listen all the way to the end. Plenty of gentle openings turn into something else by the second verse.
• Let the grandchildren pick one. They often have a song attached to her that no one else knows about — something from a car ride, or a kitchen, or a summer.
• Instrumental versions are allowed. If the lyrics are too much for the family to sit through, a piano arrangement of the same song usually is not.
• Two or three is plenty. More than that and the service starts to feel like a playlist.

When the songs are close, but none of them is her

Sometimes a family listens to twenty songs and keeps saying the same thing: it is beautiful, but it is not really about her. Nothing on any list mentions the garden, or the way she answered the phone, or the forty-one years she worked at the same school.

That is the gap a custom memorial song is meant to fill. At Their Life Song, families share the stories, sayings, and small particulars that made her herself, and we write and record an original song from them — one the family can play at the service and keep long afterward. It is not a replacement for the hymn she loved. It is the song that only ever could have been hers.

Whatever you choose, choose it gently, and do not let anyone rush you. Music has a way of holding a room together on a day when nothing else will.

Related reading

• Custom Memorial Songs: The Complete Guide
• Tribute Ideas for a Grandparent's Funeral
• Songs About Losing a Mother, and Why They Help