Losing a loved one is perhaps the toughest experience one can go through. It doesn’t help that planning the funeral services seems to come with a thousand responsibilities, sometimes even including giving the eulogy.
If you’ve decided to deliver the eulogy yourself, you might feel a little overwhelmed. After all, you don’t do this every day.
Here at Lady Anne Funerals, we want to help you through this difficult time. That’s why we’re providing these 3 steps to writing a eulogy.
1. Write down everything you might want to share
You don’t need to know exactly what you’re going to say yet. Just start writing. Think about your earliest memories with your loved one, the times you were most proud of them, the times you were most frustrated with them, your most treasured conversations with them.
Write down the highlights of their life – their childhood, schooling, career, family, accomplishments. Write about their personality, their hopes and dreams, their hobbies, their favorite foods, their bad habits – everything.
As you write, you’ll start to get an idea of which memories are most important to you, and will best represent the life of your loved one.
2. Organize your notes
You have to decide whether the eulogy will be try to encompass their life story, or will be your view of them as a person. Do you want to focus on their life accomplishments, or on what is was like to know them as well as you did?
Whichever approach you take, the next step is to organize your notes. Scratch out the memories and ideas that won’t apply to your message. Reorder what you keep to tell the story in order.
3. Say the eulogy aloud, and write down what you say
Remember, you’ll be delivering the eulogy out loud. You’re not writing an essay or magazine article. It’s best if your words sound natural. You want your written eulogy to be exactly what you would say if someone said “tell me about your loved one?”
So when you start writing, say it out loud. You’ll be talking to friends and family, so imagine you’re speaking to them as you write.
Use friendly, personal language to tell your loved one’s story.
When the moment of the service arrives, your prepared eulogy will enable you to remember and celebrate the life of your loved one.
