Eulogy for Grandma or Grandpa: What to Say, with Examples

Your mother or father will speak about a parent. You knew someone else: the grandmother whose house had different rules, the grandfather who always had time. Here is what a grandchild of any age can say, how to speak together or beside a young child, and examples for both.

Updated September 30, 2026 · 6 minute read

How long to speak, how to build it and how to get through reading it aloud are in how to write a eulogy. If your mother or father is speaking too, there are guides for a eulogy for a mother and for a father.

What only a grandchild can say

Your parents knew their mother or father through years of work, bills and worry. Many grandchildren met someone with more time, softer rules and a second go at patience. Only you can bring that person to the funeral, which is why the grandchildren’s words are often the moment people first allow themselves to smile. Ask yourself, and your cousins:

What was allowed at their house and nowhere else?
What did they call you, and what did you call them?
What did they teach you that your parents never did? A card game, a recipe, a word in another language?
What did they keep of yours: a drawing on the fridge, your first postcard from summer camp?

Where the family came from

Grandchildren are often the ones who asked, if only for a school family-tree project. If you know where your grandparent started (a place, a language, a trade, the road to where the family lives now), give it two or three plain sentences; many in the room will not know. If you know only fragments, tell fragments. If you never asked, say so: “She hardly spoke about the years before she married, and I didn’t ask. I wish I had.” Some histories are painful; you need not tell them in full, and your parents should know beforehand what you will say. This week, while the family is together, ask the oldest relatives what they remember. How to gather memories before they are lost

Eulogy examples for a grandmother and a grandfather

These are made up; what to take from them is how small and exact each detail is. Put your grandparent’s own details in their place.

For a grandmother

Every Friday Grandma did the newspaper crossword in pen, and she always left one clue blank, the easiest one, for me.It took me years to realise she knew the answer.

In her last year she called me by my mother’s name, and I answered to it. For a few minutes each visit I got to be her daughter at eleven, and she told me to take a jumper.

Grandma, I did today’s crossword. I left one clue for you.

For a grandfather

The kitchen door frame at Grandma and Grandpa’s has twenty-three pencil lines on it. Every year on his birthday he measured us, a book flat on our heads, and wrote the name and date beside each line in his tiny handwriting.

He peeled an apple in one long ribbon without breaking it, and the rule was that whoever sat closest got the ribbon. We fought over that chair for years.Only when I was grown did I notice that he always turned a little towards the youngest.

Grandpa, when they clear the flat, the door frame is coming with us.

Examples only: the details have to be theirs

One eulogy from all the grandchildren

With many grandchildren, one shared eulogy often works better than ten short ones:

Ask everyone one question in the cousins’ group: what was allowed at Grandma’s and nowhere else? Keep one line from each answer, with the writer’s name: “Ben: at Grandpa’s, the answer to ‘Can I?’ was always ‘Ask your grandmother.’”
One grandchild reads it all, or each stands and says their own line. Cousins abroad send theirs by message.
Four or five minutes in all, however many of you there are.

We are Grandma’s grandchildren, from Tom, who is thirty-four, to Ella, who is six. We asked each other what was allowed at her house and nowhere else. These are our answers.

Young grandchildren, and great-grandchildren

A child who wants to say something can, and a few lines are enough. Ask what they remember and write down exactly what they say: their words, not yours. Print it large, with a parent beside them: some children read alone, some read with the parent, some hand over the page at the last minute. All are fine. A child who would rather not speak can give one sentence for someone else to read, or nothing. Do not press.

I love Grandpa because he let me press all the buttons in the lift, even for floors we didn’t need.

Great-grandchildren will know this person mostly from your words, so write for them too, and keep the text. In Jewish families the name may carry on as well: Ashkenazim customarily name a baby after a relative who has died, while many Sephardi and Mizrahi families name grandchildren after grandparents in their lifetime, so one of you may already carry it.

If they had dementia, or lived far away

If your grandparent had dementia, the youngest grandchildren may have known only the illness. An older grandchild can give them the person from before (say, the woman who drove a school bus for thirty years) and say what remained: a song she still knew, the way she still smoothed the tablecloth. Keep the illness itself to a sentence or two.

If they lived far away, do not claim a closeness you did not have. Speak about what you did know (birthday calls, one summer, a parcel every year) and about what you see of them in your parent:

I met my grandfather perhaps nine times. What I know of him I know from my father: they have the same laugh, the kind that starts without a sound.

At the funeral, and a year later

In many families the children speak first, and your part is short: two or three minutes each, or one shared eulogy. Your parent is the mourner (by Jewish custom, grandchildren are not among the seven relatives who formally mourn), so turn to them for one sentence: “Dad, we saw how you looked after her. We saw all of it.”

A year on (at a memorial or, in Jewish families, the azkara), grandchildren often have more room: for a longer story, or for what the year without them was like, from the first holiday around a different table to a graduation with an empty seat in the second row. What to say on the anniversary of a death

After the funeral

Keep what was said, every grandchild’s line included. A memorial page can hold the eulogies, letters and photographs together; once it is open, cousins abroad can read them and add their own memories, and the family approves each one before it appears.

One place for everything that remains

A memorial page you keep: the life story, photographs, recordings, and memories that family and friends send and you approve. A reminder before each yahrzeit when the page keeps the Hebrew date, and everything downloadable at any time. Creating and filling the page is free. It stays private, seen only by you, until you open it to others with one payment: ₪99 in Israel, $39 elsewhere. No subscription.

Create a memorial page See an example page

Common questions

How do I start a eulogy for my grandmother?

Give your name and your place among the grandchildren, then go straight to something specific: “I’m Jess, her fourth grandchild, the one she taught to cheat at rummy.” The first detail tells the room this is about her, not about grandmothers.

Can I read a poem at my grandma’s funeral?

Yes, if it is hers: a poem she loved, a song she sang you to sleep with, a few lines from a book on her shelf. One verse, once, near the end. A “poem for grandma” found online fits every grandmother, and so not her.

What do I write in a letter to Grandma in heaven?

What you would tell her if you could: what has happened since, one memory, a thank-you. Write the way you talked to her. Writing to a parent who has died works just as well for a grandparent.