Eulogies Editing and Proofreading Services

The eulogy describes a wonderful husband, father and friend who will be deeply missed. It says he loved his family and enjoyed his garden. Three hundred people who came because he mattered to them are listening to a paragraph that could be read at any funeral in the building that week, and the person delivering it, who is grieving and has ninety seconds of composure to spend, has nothing specific enough to hold onto when the composure runs out.

We edit what people write to deliver at a funeral or memorial — eulogies for a parent, spouse, sibling, friend or colleague, tributes read by someone who is not the primary speaker, remarks for a life celebration or humanist service, words for a religious service written for someone who does not usually attend one, notes for a eulogy given jointly by several family members, and the shorter tribute read at a graveside. Our editors work with people writing this for the first time, at the worst possible moment to learn how.

The specific detail is what a eulogy stands or falls on, and its failure is a list of virtues that could belong to anyone. Loved his family is not a sentence about him. We work through these so each virtue claimed is attached to one incident that demonstrates it, since "he was generous" said once and shown once does more than the word repeated three times; so the person's own words or turns of phrase appear somewhere in it, given that hearing him again, even for one sentence, is what people are actually there for; so the eulogy is organised around a small number of moments rather than a chronology from birth to death, because a life read as a timeline flattens exactly the parts that made it a particular life; so contradictions are allowed to stand — difficult and loving, private and generous — as a tidied version is recognised as false by everyone who knew him; so the sentence structure is short and the paragraphs are short, given that the person delivering this may need to stop, and a text with natural places to stop is a kindness to them; so a role is given to the room, such as a shared moment of quiet or a line everyone says together, because eulogies that only ask people to listen leave them nowhere to put what they feel; and so it ends on him rather than on grief in the abstract. Eulogies written this way are the ones people ask to keep a copy of.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including family circumstances, health details and personal stories. We are editors rather than celebrants, chaplains or grief counsellors, and we offer no view on your loss or what should be included. What we can do is help you find the details that sound like him and nobody else.