What makes a good funeral and How to Write a Eulogy

A good funeral balances grief and gladness. We have grief, that the person is gone and gladness that the person was here. Half of the memorial time should be sobbing; the other half laughing. Or at least tearing up and also smiling. Why not school all speakers in the 50/50 rule? They won’t listen but at least you will know you tried. You set a reasonable and achievable objective by which to measure, both a life and a memorial of a life.

By the way, a funeral is a service about death, which emphasizes one person’s death; a memorial is the remembrance of one person and “minors” in learning about death. Funerals happened when religious institutions were intact. They have been replaced by memorials. They might be hybrids also, interchangeably called memorials or funerals.

A good funeral/memorial says lovely things about the deceased and also mentions their flaws. When the speakers sit down, you feel like they knew the same person you did and whom you came to memorialize. I almost always say something like, “John was not always the person he meant to be.” Or “Betty missed some of the marks she set for herself.”

A good funeral helps us to avoid individualism. Someone wise, like a preacher or an elder, says something wise about what everybody is really thinking about, which is their own death. A good funeral prepares us to die. It is death school. You graduate whether you flunk the courses or not.