What to say in a eulogy for your mother

Do not open by trying to sound objective. Everyone in that room knows exactly who you are and what she was to you, and a neutral opening reads as someone holding themselves at a distance to stay upright.

The strongest openings for a parent are simple. One sentence that says who you are and what you are about to do. Then get straight into her.

It may be the longest relationship of your life, so you have the most material and the least perspective. You will reach for the things she did for you, which is natural but can flatten her into a role.

The correction is to find her outside the mothering. What she was like before you existed. What she wanted that had nothing to do with the family. What she was good at that nobody thanked her for. A room full of people who mostly knew her as somebody’s mother will hear that as the first real glimpse of her.

Almost every mother has three or four phrases she used so often that the whole family can still hear them. Those are worth more than any description of her character, and they are often the lines that make people laugh in the middle of crying.

Write down every one you can remember, then pick the two that are most specifically hers.

Relationships with mothers are often complicated, and a eulogy that pretends otherwise will not be believed by the people who were there for it.

You do not have to settle anything. Naming it once, plainly and without detail, and then speaking warmly about what was genuinely good, is honest and lets everyone else be honest too. The rule is that a funeral or memorial service is not the place to make a case. It is the place to be truthful at the size the room can hold.

Not with a summary of her life and not with a thank-you to the audience. End on one small specific thing: something she said, something she did, somewhere she liked to be.

A detail lets people leave with her in their head. A summary lets them leave with your words in their head.