Eulogy for My Husband or Wife: Writing Tips and Examples

If you have never written a eulogy, how to write a eulogy covers length, structure and reading aloud. This page is about what changes when it is your husband or wife.

Do you have to speak at your spouse’s funeral?

No. Nobody expects it, and many widows and widowers do not speak. Others feel only they can say what they know, then find on the morning that they have no voice. You can plan for both:

• Write it and have someone else read it: a son or daughter, a brother, a close friend, the rabbi. Keep it in the first person, have them begin “These are Carol’s words about Mike”, and give them a large-print copy the day before.
• Stand beside the reader, and perhaps say the last line yourself.
• Write three sentences, not three pages. From a husband or wife, a few words can say more than a long eulogy.
• Speak later, at the first month or the first anniversary, when it is often easier.

Telling the story of a marriage without making it about you

A spouse’s eulogy tends to drift into “we” (our wedding, our trips, our house) until the person disappears into the couple, or into the loss. Both are real. Neither is the eulogy.

• Start before you. Give a sentence to the years before the marriage, or ask an old friend for a story.
• Tell what only you saw: what she was like at six in the morning, the voice he used for the dog, what frightened him. One detail like that is worth the whole biography.
• Turn each “we” story towards them. Ask what it shows about them, and keep that part.
• Give your own grief one sentence. “I do not yet know how to live in a house without his noise in it” is honest, and enough. Then go back to him.
• If they were funny, be funny. If laughter was part of your marriage, a story that makes the room laugh may be the truest thing you say.

A long marriage, a short one, a second one

• After forty or fifty years, skip the milestones everyone knows and tell one ordinary morning: who made the tea, what was said over it. A long marriage lives in its routines.
• After a short marriage, you are grieving a future as well as a person, and you can say so. Their parents have lost a child; one sentence to them matters.
• In a second marriage, part of their life belonged to others first. Say so generously (“For thirty years before I met him, Ben was Judith’s husband and Dan and Hannah’s father”), and name the children of every marriage.
• In a blended family, agree beforehand who speaks, and let stepchildren and children of an earlier marriage speak if they want to. They have lost someone too.

After an illness, or a sudden death

If you were also the carer (the pill organiser, the nights, the waiting rooms), one or two sentences are enough: “The last two years were wards and pill charts, and she hated every minute of being looked after.” Then go back to the life. Leave out your own devotion; everyone saw it. Thank the people who helped instead, by name: the hospice team who came to the house, the cousin who drove you both to every scan. If the death was sudden, say what happened in one plain sentence, then speak about the life.

When the children are listening

• Speak to them once, by name, about something of their parent in them: “Josh, you shout at the referee exactly the way he did.”
• Do not hand them a job. “You’re the man of the house now” is meant kindly, but a child hears it as a burden.
• With young children, keep it short, and tell them beforehand what they will see and hear. Talking to children about death
• With grown-up children, divide the ground: they speak about the parent, you about the partner.

If you are speaking about a couple

When a son, a daughter or an old friend speaks (often when the second parent dies), tell the marriage as you saw it from outside: how they argued in the car, the song they danced to at every wedding. If the one who is left is there, look at them once.

Short eulogy examples for a husband and a wife

For a husband

For a wife

The first month, the first year and the yahrzeit

A month or a year on, the words are shorter and closer: what the year alone has been, what you have learned to do that used to be theirs. What to say on the anniversary of a death

In Jewish custom a husband or wife is one of the seven mourners who sit shiva. Mourning for a spouse lasts thirty days, the shloshim, from the burial; the twelve months are for a parent. So at the shloshim azkara the widow or widower customarily ends formal mourning, while the children, mourning a parent, continue for the year. It is a count of customs, not of grief. The year of mourning

Nor is Kaddish for a spouse the obligation it is for a parent. Some communities say it through the shloshim, and some continue longer when there are no children to say it; customs vary, so ask the family’s rabbi.

A letter to your husband or wife in heaven

Many widows and widowers keep writing to the person they used to tell everything: on the wedding anniversary, on a birthday, before the first yahrzeit. The method is the same as for a letter to a parent who has died; what goes in is the small news of a shared life: the boiler that finally gave out, the decision you made alone and wanted to argue about.

Some keep their letters and the eulogy on a memorial page; once the page is open, the couple’s friends can send their stories to sit beside them. The family approves each memory before it appears.