Eulogy Example for a Mother (5 Minutes, With the Structure Explained)

A eulogy is five minutes, three stories, one thread. You are not summarising a life; the obituary did that. You are telling the room what she was like, through things that happened. This example is about 650 words, which reads in five minutes at a calm pace.

Fictional family.

Good morning. I'm Susan, Margaret's oldest, and I'm going to try to do this without crying, which Mom would tell me is a waste of effort.

My mother taught second grade for thirty-one years, so she was used to a room full of people who weren't sure what to do next. That is what we are today. So I'll do what she did: I'll tell you three things and then I'll let you go to lunch.

The first thing is the leftovers. Nobody, in seventy-six years, left my mother's house empty-handed. Not the plumber. Not the Jehovah's Witnesses, who I believe are still working through a container of goulash. When I was in college, three hours away, she would drive down "because she was in the area" with a cooler. She was never in the area. The cooler was the point. I understood, much later, that feeding people was how she said the thing she found hard to say out loud, and that she said it constantly.

The second thing is the bird feeder. Mom kept a feeder outside the kitchen window, and she knew every bird that came to it, not the species, the individual birds. There was a cardinal she called The Senator. When my father was dying, she sat at that window every morning with her coffee and watched the feeder, and I think it was the only twenty minutes of the day when she wasn't taking care of someone. She taught me that you have to keep one small thing that is only yours. I have a feeder now. I am not good at it yet.

The third thing is a story she never told, so I'll tell it. In 1988 a boy in her class came to school in February without a coat, three days running. Mom didn't call anyone. She went to the church rummage sale, bought a coat, and left it on his chair with a note that said "found this in lost and found, looks about your size." It was not in lost and found. He was not fooled. He wore it for three winters. He came to the visitation last night, he is fifty now, and he told me that story, and I had never heard it. There are, I suspect, a great many stories like that, and we will never hear most of them, because that is how she did things.

That was my mother. She fed you, she kept one small window for herself, and she did the right thing quietly and then lied about it so you wouldn't feel bad.

We are going to go to the parish hall now and eat lunch, because she would have insisted. Please take a container home. There is no getting out of it.

Thank you, Mom. We'll keep the feeder full.

Why it works

• Open by saying who you are and why you are standing there. One line. Then a small joke if it is true to her; it lets the room breathe.
• Three stories, each with a concrete object: the cooler, the feeder, the coat. Objects carry emotion better than adjectives.
• The thread: she took care of people quietly. Say it once, near the end, in one sentence.
• Close with an instruction to the room and a direct line to her. Then stop.
• Read it aloud twice before the service. Mark where to pause. Bring a printed copy; phones die.

More

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