How do I write a eulogy?

From a secular and philosophical standpoint, writing a eulogy is one of the most meaningful acts of language a person can undertake. It is an attempt to hold a life still for a moment, to give it shape and weight in words, at precisely the time when grief makes language feel most inadequate. Philosophers from the Stoics to the existentialists have thought deeply about mortality, memory, and what it means to speak truthfully about a human life. What they collectively suggest is that a eulogy is not a performance of sadness, nor a sanitised portrait, but something closer to an act of witness. You are standing up to say: this person existed, this is what that existence meant, and we are altered by having known them.

The philosophical tradition encourages you to begin not with what you think you should say, but with what is genuinely true. Montaigne, the great French essayist and one of the most honest writers about human life and death, believed that honest, particular observation of real experience was more valuable than grand abstraction. In that spirit, the most powerful eulogies tend to be built from specific, concrete details rather than general praise. Instead of saying someone was kind, you describe the particular way they were kind to you or to others. Instead of calling them funny, you tell the story that actually made people laugh. These specifics do the emotional work that vague virtue-words cannot. They also make the person recognisable to everyone listening, which is itself a form of respect.

Secular thought also invites you to be honest about complexity. A person's life is rarely a simple moral lesson, and listeners who loved the deceased will sense immediately if the portrait being painted is too clean. The Stoics, particularly Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, wrote with great honesty about human imperfection, and their moral writing has endured partly because of that honesty. You do not need to expose anyone's private struggles or air grievances, but you can acknowledge that the person was fully human, that they wrestled with things, that their virtues were hard-won rather than effortless. This kind of truthfulness honours the person far more than beatification does.

It helps to think about what the eulogy is actually for. In secular terms, it serves several purposes at once. It processes shared grief by naming it and giving it a focus. It creates a collective memory that everyone present can carry away. It also, in a quieter way, argues for the value of a particular kind of life. Albert Camus wrote about the importance of facing the reality of death without flinching and finding meaning in human connection despite that reality. A eulogy can do something similar: not pretend that death is not devastating, but insist that what the person gave to the world, in love, in work, in laughter, in presence, was real and lasting and worth speaking aloud.

Practically, most secular eulogists find it helps to write in sections rather than trying to produce one continuous flowing text from the start. You might gather memories, themes, and key moments first, almost as raw material. Then you look for the thread running through them, the quality or value or way of being in the world that feels most central to who this person was. The opening should draw people in, often with a specific memory or image. The middle explores the life with honesty and warmth. The ending should give people somewhere to land, not necessarily comfort in a transcendent sense, but something that acknowledges both the loss and the continuing presence of the person in those who loved them. Humanist celebrants, who guide many secular funeral ceremonies, often speak about the idea that a person lives on in the choices, habits and values they pass to others. That is a genuinely philosophical idea, not just a consoling phrase, and it can give your closing words real substance.

Finally, allow yourself to be moved as you write. There is a school of thought, going back to Aristotle's writing on rhetoric and emotion, that the speaker who feels something genuine is more persuasive and more connecting than one who performs feeling. You are not writing a press release or a tribute in a company newsletter. You are writing something that will exist at the intersection of one person's entire life and the grief of everyone who loved them. Write it with care, revise it more than once, and read it aloud to yourself before the day. But do not sand away its roughness entirely. The places where the words cost you something are often the places where other people will feel most met.