Eulogy examples

I’m Claire, Joan’s daughter. Thank you for coming, and for all the cards and casseroles this past fortnight. Mum would have written a thank-you note for every one of them, so I’m afraid I’ll have to as well.

If you ever visited our house, you’ll remember the tin. A dented Quality Street tin on the hall table, always full. Mum refilled it every Saturday. Postmen, neighbours’ kids, my friends at sixteen who pretended they weren’t hungry: nobody left without something from the tin.

That was Mum. She noticed who needed feeding, who needed a lift, who needed a phone call. She worked thirty years at the library and could find you a book, a bus timetable or a plumber, and she remembered your children’s names while she did it.

She was also stubborn, wonderfully so. She took up swimming at sixty-eight because a doctor said she probably couldn’t. She swam her first mile at seventy.

In her last weeks she asked me to make sure the tin stayed full. So it’s by the door today, on your way out. Please take something. Mum, we love you, and we’ll keep noticing people, the way you taught us.

Good afternoon. I’m Michael, Frank’s eldest. Dad would have hated all this fuss, so I’ll try to keep it the way he liked things: short, practical, and with a joke somewhere in the middle.

Dad was patient. He taught all four of us to drive in the same brown Volvo, and not once did he raise his voice, even when my brother reversed into the garden wall. He just got out, looked at the wall, and said, “Well, that’s one way to find the brakes.”

Dad was practical. He could fix a washing machine, a bike chain or a broken heart with the same toolkit: a cup of tea and his full attention. When my marriage ended, he drove over with a flat-pack bookcase and built it with me in silence. It was exactly what I needed.

And Dad was funny, in the dry way that took you a second to catch. His last words to the nurse, when she asked if he was comfortable, were, “I make a decent living.”

Dad, thank you for your patience with us, your hands, and your terrible jokes. We’ll look after Mum. Rest easy.

Hello, I’m Aisha, one of Nani’s eleven grandchildren. She would want me to tell you that she loved us all equally, and that I was her favourite. I’m fairly sure she told all eleven of us that.

Nani came to this country in 1968 with one suitcase and a recipe book written in her own hand. That book fed three generations. Every Sunday her kitchen was full of steam, arguments about cricket and far more food than any family could eat.

She taught me to fold samosas when I was six. Mine always burst open. She would take the broken ones, call them “chef’s samples,” and eat them herself so I wouldn’t feel bad.

What she gave us was a place where everyone belonged. Friends, neighbours, strangers who came to fix the boiler: she fed them all and asked about their mothers.

Last month she gave me the recipe book. I still burst the samosas. Nani, I’ll keep practising, and I’ll keep the broken ones for myself.

I’m Jordan. Danny and I met on the first day of university, arguing over the last bunk in halls. He won, and I spent the next twenty years forgiving him.

If you wanted to know Danny, you only needed one night out with him. He would arrive late, apologise to the whole room, learn the bartender’s name and life story, get everyone singing, and then quietly make sure the shy person in the corner got home safe.

He was the friend who remembered your job interview and texted at 9:01 to ask how it went. He was the one who showed up with pizza when your dog died.

His family knew him as a son, brother and uncle. We knew him as the glue. Our group chat has been silent for a week because none of us knows how to be funny without him.

Danny, you can have the bunk. Thank you for twenty years of turning up late and staying till the end. We’ll try to make sure everyone gets home safe.