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Eulogy for a Grandmother: Full Example and How to Write Yours
A complete example eulogy for a grandmother, with opening lines, structure, and advice on speaking for many cousins at once.
About 3 minutes spoken
A grandchild giving a eulogy is usually speaking on behalf of a group. There are cousins in the room who knew a different version of her, and an aunt or uncle who knew her far longer than you did.
That is an advantage. You are allowed to speak as the generation she made, rather than as the authority on her life. Say what she was to all of you, and let her children keep their own version.
A complete example
This is fictional and written to be delivered aloud. Read it for shape and rhythm rather than for wording to borrow. The details are the part that has to be yours.
I'm Marisol. I'm one of Rose's eleven grandchildren, and I have been asked to speak for all of us, which is the most dangerous assignment in this family.
Our grandmother left school at sixteen to help at home. She learned to sew from her mother and ran the alterations counter at Baird's for twenty-two years. She could look at a hem and tell you the measurement, out loud, correctly. People stopped checking. My cousin Danny tested her once with a tape measure. He was wrong and she was right and he has never fully recovered.
The kitchen was the whole thing. Pierogi at Christmas, an argument every single year about whether there were enough, and always, obviously, more than enough. She cooked as though a bus might arrive.
She had a drawer of butterscotch candies that we were not supposed to open. She never locked it. She never restocked it in front of us either, which for about thirty years allowed all eleven of us to believe we were getting away with something.
Here is what I did not understand until I was an adult. She was not a soft woman. She was a woman who had decided, quite deliberately, that this family was going to be a soft place. Those are different things, and the second one is much harder work.
She buried a husband and a son. She did it without ever once making the rest of us responsible for carrying it. When my mother tried to talk to her about it, she would say the same thing every time: "I have you. Go eat something."
So what she left us is a family that turns up with too much food and does not talk about feelings especially well, and honestly, it works. Eleven grandchildren, nineteen great-grandchildren, and every one of them has somewhere to go on a bad day. She built that. She built it out of pierogi and butterscotch and refusing to be a burden.
Busia, we counted. There was always enough.
Four ways to open
Do not begin with “I have been asked to say a few words.” Start inside a scene. Each of these drops the room straight into a specific moment.
The house as the subject
There were eleven of us grandchildren, and every single one believed we were her favorite. I have since compared notes with my cousins. She ran a remarkably sophisticated operation.
The kitchen
My grandmother's kitchen had a drawer of butterscotch candies we were technically not allowed to open. In sixty years she never once locked it.
What she called you
My grandmother called all of us "lovey," which we assumed was affection until we got older and realized she had eleven grandchildren and a system.
For a long decline
For the last two years my grandmother did not always know which grandchild I was. She was always, without exception, delighted that one of us had come.
The five-part structure
Almost every eulogy that works follows this shape, whether or not the person writing it knew that.
01Say who you are
10 seconds
One sentence. "I'm Dana, Ruth's youngest." Half the room does not know you, and they cannot follow the stories until they know where you stood.
02Give the one line
15 seconds
The single sentence that captures them. Not a list of qualities. One claim you can then prove.
03Prove it with two stories
2 minutes
Two specific scenes, forty to sixty seconds each. Concrete details do the work that adjectives cannot.
04Say what they left behind
30 seconds
What the people in this room do differently because of them. Keep it to a few sentences.
05Close by speaking to them
20 seconds
Turn from the room to the person. A short, direct farewell lands better than a summary.
Writing it, and getting through it
- Ask the cousins for one memory each a few days beforehand. Use two. The others will hear their own family in what you chose.
- Use the name her grandchildren actually called her. It signals immediately whose voice this is.
- Do not try to cover her whole life. Her children may speak, and the obituary carries the record. Your job is one generation's version.
- If she had a long decline, you may name it briefly and then move past it. The last two years are not the story.
- Three to four minutes is right for a grandchild's eulogy, particularly when others are also speaking.
- Practice the closing line until it is automatic. That is the sentence that will break you if it is not.
For the printed service
The program that goes with the eulogy
Everything here stays free. If you also need the printed pieces, TributeReady drafts the tribute wording with you, lets you edit every line, and produces a print-ready funeral program, memorial keepsake, and thank-you card for a one-time $34.99.
Questions people ask
- Is it appropriate for a grandchild to give the eulogy?
- Very. It is increasingly common, and grandchildren frequently give the warmest eulogy of the service because they are one step removed from the immediate grief. Coordinate with your parent and the officiant so that speakers do not overlap.
- How do I speak for all the grandchildren?
- Say explicitly that you are, then gather one memory from each cousin and use two of them. Name the cousins whose memories you used. Everyone else will recognize the shared material and will not feel left out.
- What if I did not know her well?
- Say so plainly and speak about what you did have. "I saw her twice a year, and here is what those visits were like" is honest and specific. A short true eulogy is better than a long one built from other people's memories.
More eulogy examples
Editorial note
Every example on this page is fictional and does not describe a real person. Timings are approximate and assume a spoken pace of roughly one hundred and thirty words a minute. Ask the officiant how long you have before you write, because services with several speakers are usually tightly scheduled.