Eulogy for a Brother or Sister: Writing Tips and Examples

This page covers only what changes when it is a brother or a sister; for length, structure and reading aloud, start with how to write a eulogy.

What only a brother or sister can say

Their husband or wife knew the adult, their friends a chapter, their children a parent. You knew them before any of that: the shared bedroom, the same parents seen from two different heights, the fights nobody else remembers. If your parents have died, you may be the last person who remembers the house you grew up in. That long view is what you bring.

• What did the two of you fight about as children, and what did you never fight about?
• What did they know about you that nobody else did, and never once use?
• When did you first see them as an adult? At a first job, a wedding, holding a child of their own?
• If they were the younger one: what did you teach them, and what did they end up teaching you?

Eulogy examples for a brother and a sister

Both are made up. Keep how they are built (who is speaking, one shared object, a last line spoken to them) and fill it with your own.

A eulogy for a brother

A eulogy for a sister

When your parents are still alive

Burying a child is the loss parents dread most, and everyone at the funeral knows it. People will ask after your parents and their husband or wife; fewer will ask after you. Both griefs are real, and today is not the day to weigh them.

• Ask them first what they would like said, and what they cannot hear today. Some want to speak; some want you to read a few lines for them.
• Do not rank the grief: neither “nothing is worse than burying your child”, which leaves you out, nor “I have lost the person closest to me”, which leaves them out. Say what you have lost, and let theirs be theirs.
• Tell one story they are in: your father teaching you both to swim in the same cold sea. It gives them back their child as a child.
• Speak to them in one sentence. “Mum, Dad, you gave me a brother. Thank you for him.”

When their spouse and children are listening

If your brother or sister had a family of their own, the spouse and children are now the closest mourners, and they decide who speaks and in what order. Tell them what you plan to say, so you do not take a story that belongs to them.

For nieces and nephews you hold something nobody else does: their parent as a child. Tell them one thing they could not have known: the dog she hid on the balcony for a week, the school play he walked out of. Then speak to them: “Yael, Omer, at nine your mum was braver than I am now. Ask me, and I will tell you the rest.” If they are small, keep a copy for later. Talking to children about a death

If you were not close

Brothers and sisters drift apart, fall out over money or a parent’s care, sometimes go years without speaking. You do not have to pretend, or to speak at all. If you do, tell the narrow truth: “We were closer at nine than at forty. But at nine, nobody in the world was closer.” Do not settle accounts, and do not make the eulogy the apology you owed them; that belongs in a letter to them alone, written like a letter to a parent who has died.

If they died young

A brother or sister who dies young takes a future with them: the person you expected to grow old beside. Name what happened once, simply, and give the rest of your time to what they did with the years they had. You do not have to make sense of it, and “everything happens for a reason” comforts no one at a young person’s funeral.

For a long illness, see a eulogy for a mother; for a sudden death, a eulogy for a father. If your brother or sister lived with addiction, or took their own life, agree beforehand with your parents and their spouse what will be said. You can name it or leave it out; you do not describe how it happened. “My brother fought an addiction for twelve years. He was also the funniest person I have ever known.” Both are true, and your time belongs to the second.

If the grief does not ease with time, or the way they died keeps coming back to you, a grief counsellor, a therapist or your GP can help. If it ever feels like too much, you can call at any hour: in Israel, ERAN on 1201; in the US and Canada, 988; in the UK and Ireland, Samaritans on 116 123; elsewhere, your local emergency number.

Jewish mourning for a brother or sister

By Jewish custom a brother or sister (half-siblings included) is one of the seven relatives one mourns, with father, mother, son, daughter and spouse. Siblings tear a garment at the funeral (for a sibling, on the right), sit shiva and keep the shloshim: thirty days from the burial, not the twelve months kept for a parent. Your parents are mourners too, and many families sit shiva together. Many say Kaddish for a brother or sister during the shloshim; customs differ, so ask the family’s rabbi.

The anniversary, and the years after

The mourning ends at thirty days; missing them does not. Each year, on the Hebrew date of death, the family gathers at the grave for an azkara, often organised by a sibling when the children are young or the parents frail. Kaddish is usually said by the person’s children; if there are none, or none who can, often by a brother. Yizkor, on Yom Kippur and the festivals, can be said for a brother or sister too.

At the grave, two or three minutes and one thing about the year are enough: “It has been three years. Omer has started driving, and he brakes exactly like you did: too late and all at once.” What to say on the anniversary of a death

After the funeral

Ask every speaker for their pages, and keep your own. A memorial page can hold the eulogies with photographs and, once the page is open, the memories friends send in, each approved by the family before it appears; years from now, nieces and nephews will find their parent there as a child.