Writing a Eulogy for Your Wife

How to structure it

• Don't try to tell the whole marriage. Choose two or three moments that could only belong to her and give each one room to breathe.
• Work in short sittings, fifteen minutes at a time. Some days the words won't come at all; take that as information, not failure, and come back in the morning.
• Talk before you write. Record yourself telling one story about her aloud, the way you would tell it to a friend, and start from the sentences that sound like your own voice.
• Have an adult child or a close friend read the draft back to you slowly. You aren't looking for edits; you're listening for the line you won't be able to say, so you can move it or soften it now.
• Keep the opening and the closing steady and put the heaviest lines in the middle, so the last thing you have to deliver is something you can actually get through.
• Print it in a large font, number the pages, and hand a spare copy to someone in the front row before the service starts.

Strong opening lines

• Every morning for thirty-two years she ground the coffee beans by hand, slowly, because she said the machine ones tasted like a hotel lobby, and I have not made the coffee the machine way even once since last Tuesday.
• There is a dent in the passenger seat of my car shaped exactly like the way she used to sit with her knee against the door, and some mornings, out of pure habit, I still catch myself asking her to move her foot over.
• She kept every birthday card anyone ever gave her in a shoebox marked 'important papers,' and the actual important papers were loose in a kitchen drawer, and that tells you nearly everything about what my wife thought mattered.
• My wife sang the harmony to every song on the radio, never the melody, for thirty years, and the house is the wrong kind of quiet now.

What to include

Start with the archive nobody else has: how you met, told the way you've always told it, with the detail that makes people laugh even when they've heard it before. Add the shorthand of a long marriage, the look across the table that meant it was time to leave, the ritual she guarded, the garden row nobody else was allowed to weed. Say who you were when you met her and what she made possible afterward: the risks you took because she believed you could, the patience you learned from watching her. Then keep the ordinary things, because they are the true ones. The radio station, the grocery list in her handwriting still on the fridge, the sound of her laugh from the next room. Those are what people will recognize in their own chests, and what you will reach for on an ordinary Tuesday when the service is long over.

Funeral and cultural tradition notes

Let the setting set the length. A traditional religious service usually keeps personal remarks to about five minutes, with the officiant carrying the rest of the ceremony. A celebration of life or secular memorial gives you more room and more license for warmth and humor, often shared between several speakers. Graveside remarks run shortest, a few quiet sentences, because the place itself is already saying most of it. And if you doubt you can stand and speak at all, tell the officiant. Reading a widower's words aloud for him is something they have done many times, and no one in that room will think less of you for it.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Covering the whole marriage in order instead of trusting two or three of her moments to say everything.
• Forcing it out in one long night, which usually produces something stiffer and further from your actual voice.
• Cutting the small domestic details as too trivial, when the grocery list and the radio station are exactly what the room remembers her by.
• Believing you must read it yourself, when handing it to a friend, a child, or the officiant is common and takes nothing away from it being yours.