Writing a Eulogy for a Colleague or Mentor

How to structure it

• Open by naming how you actually knew them: the team, the years, the project that put you in the same room, so the audience can place you before you say anything else.
• Move straight into one story that has nothing to do with their job title, since that's the part no performance review would ever think to write down.
• Widen out to how they shaped the people around them: the intern they trained without being asked to, the meeting they quietly defused, the door they left open when everyone else's was shut.
• Let a physical detail do the work instead of an adjective, like the mug that never left the same corner of the desk or the pen everyone borrowed and nobody returned.
• Say plainly what changes for you now that they're gone, one concrete thing, not a vague promise to keep their spirit alive.
• End on something small and specific rather than a grand summary, a phrase they used, a habit you've already caught yourself copying.

Strong opening lines

• I sat two desks from him for six years, close enough to hear him lose four separate arguments with the vending machine and never once lose his patience with a person.
• The last email she sent me was a typo-filled reminder to eat lunch, timestamped 11:47 on a Tuesday, and I've read it more times this month than I want to admit.
• He kept a rubber-band ball on his desk that grew by exactly one band a week, and somehow it outlasted three reorganizations, two office moves, and a company rename.
• Ask anyone in that building who covered a shift without being asked, and you'll hear the same three names come back every time. Mine was one of them.

What to include

Look for material that survives outside the office. A piece of advice they repeated so often you can still hear it in their voice is worth more than any list of achievements. So is how they treated the newest, most junior person on the team, since that's usually the truest measure of who someone was when nothing was riding on it. A catchphrase, a running joke, a specific way they answered the phone or signed off an email can bring the room back to them faster than any summary of their career. And keep an eye out for the one kindness that had nothing to do with work at all: the ride home in the rain, the casserole after a bad week, the five minutes they gave you when they clearly didn't have five minutes to spare. Those are the details people lean forward for.

Funeral and cultural tradition notes

Where you're speaking changes how far you can push a story. A funeral service tends to call for a quieter, more restrained tone, especially if the room includes family members who never met your colleague at work and don't share the office's inside jokes. A company memorial or a celebration of life usually gives you more room to be funny, informal, even a little irreverent, since the crowd already speaks the same language you do. Either way, strip out the internal shorthand: project code names, department acronyms, software your colleague's parents or partner have never heard of. Translate the achievement into what it meant to a person, not what it meant to a spreadsheet. If the service follows a specific religious or cultural tradition, defer to the officiant or the family on customs and phrasing rather than guessing, since practices vary widely even within the same faith.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Reading their job title and years of service as if introducing them at an awards dinner, instead of opening with a moment that shows who they were.
• Leaning on office jargon or project names that mean nothing to the family and friends sitting in the same room.
• Turning the eulogy into a list of their accomplishments rather than a story about how they treated the people around them.
• Assuming everyone in the room already knows how you knew them, when a single sentence of context would let the rest of the eulogy land properly.
• Praising their output or their title rather than the specific, small kindness that had nothing to do with either one.
• Closing with a generic line about their legacy instead of the one habit or piece of advice that is still shaping how you work today.
• Reading the eulogy cold in front of the room without practicing it out loud once, which is usually where jargon and overlong sentences get caught and cut.
• Treating the eulogy as a chance to represent the company rather than the person, when the room came to hear about the colleague, not the brand.
• Forgetting to name how long you actually worked together, since that one detail tells the room how much weight your account of them should carry.