How to read a eulogy without breaking down

Your voice will probably go at some point. Planning to hold it together perfectly means depending on the one thing you cannot control.

Plan for the other thing instead. Build the speech so that a thirty-second pause anywhere in it does no damage.

Whatever sentence you cannot currently read without stopping, move it into the first third. Many people are steadiest at the start, while the adrenaline lasts.

Do not save the most emotional material for the end. That may work as dramatic structure, but it can be difficult for the person who has to remain standing.

Print it in 16-point type or larger, double-spaced. Paper does not lock its screen, run out of battery or need a hand to scroll. Print it if you prefer paper, or read it from your phone.

Number the pages and do not staple them.

Mark your breathing. A slash or a double space where you intend to pause. When your voice goes, the marks are what get you back in.

Put a period where you would naturally run on. Short sentences are far easier to say than long ones when you are not in control of your breathing.

Have water within reach, and have one person in the front row who knows to come up and finish it for you if you signal them. Knowing they are there is often what makes it unnecessary.

Stop. Look at the page, not at the room. Breathe out for longer than you breathe in, twice. Then find your last marked pause and start from there.

Nobody will mind. The room is on your side, and many of them are barely holding it together, too. A pause reads as love, not as failure.

Read it out loud at least three times, standing, ideally in a room bigger than the one you wrote it in. You are not rehearsing the words, you are finding out which lines you cannot say yet, so you can move or shorten them.

If you have written it with Youlogy, you can also hear how it sounds aloud and get a sense of the timing. That lets you hear the shape of it without having to deliver it yourself. It does not replace practicing it. Words that look right on the page can feel very different when you have to say them.