Website Marketing Club

Grandmother Eulogy – Farewell Words

Nov 3, 2009 Writing and Speaking

Almost a year has now gone by since my grandmother passed away, thankfully the pain has subsided significantly but there is still one emotion that’s raw. I still remember all too well the overwhelming surge of panic that I felt when I realized my cousins had nominated me to deliver the eulogy for our grandmother. Have you found yourself in the same situation of fear and dread? Read on, you’re not the only one.

At the time of her passing I was living in Australia, so I rushed to get the first flight back to New Zealand to be with my family. We are a tight knit family and everyone rushed to be there and help with the many preparations that had to be made. As she was a well known figure in the community, we knew that the funeral would be large and would need to cater to many different cultures, religions and social groups. As the jobs were being delegated I was pleased, yet terrified, that I had been given the role of delivering the eulogy from her many grandchildren.

The biggest hurdle that I had to overcome was my own nerves and feelings of inadequacy. Public speaking is not something that usually throws me into a spin of panic and fear, because I do a small amount of it in my working life and in my church. But the difference here is that I knew I would be speaking to large audience and that audience would include civic leaders, elders within the church, old teachers of mine, and most nerve wracking of all… my whole family.

But I didn’t have time to fret about it all, I just had to get over my nerves and get on with preparing my speech and getting some practice time in. Here’s what I did to overcome it: I kept reminding myself that this was not a sales presentation or key note speech at a conference, my job was not to convince anyone of anything… at all. It didn’t matter if I sounded articulate or not, whether I came across as intelligent or not and it wouldn’t even matter if I started to cry. If anything, crying would convince everyone attending that my words were more than just words, they were a tribute to a woman who’s memory brought up a huge well of emotion and love.

Now that I had come to a place where I wasn’t fearful about the delivery of the eulogy, I had to put together something that would be coherent and well structured, but also emotive and personal. I immediately set to work on the internet looking for help on how to structure a eulogy and the types of things that are appropriate to include. I found a great article by Michelle Rudge called Grandmother – Eulogy of Love that outlines some of the different ways you can speak about your grandmother. The article pointed me to other resources that would be helpful too.

Before struggling to write your speech, visit this other great article called Eulogy Quotes – Are Eulogy Quotes Appropriate? which outlines what kind of quotes you could use in your speech.

Tags: eulogies, eulogy quotes, funerals, grandmother eulogy, public speaking, quotes, speaking, speeches, Writing and Speaking