How to Write a Eulogy for Your Brother
A sibling eulogy has a shape of its own: you shared the childhood, so you are the only person in the room who can describe where he started.
Fill-in template
I am NAME, and NAME was my older/younger brother.
I knew him before most of you did. Before the job, the marriage, the town, he was WHO HE WAS AT TEN.
ONE STORY from the shared house, or one from adulthood that rhymes with it.
He never really stopped being that. THE TRAIT, from the beginning.
He leaves NAME EVERYONE.
CLOSING LINE, in the register the two of you actually used.
A finished example, about two minutes
I am Danny, and Mark was my older brother by four years.
I knew him before most of you did. Before the business, before Clare, before any of the respectability, he was a nine-year-old who once convinced me that the loft was rented out to a man called Terrence.
I believed it for a full year. I left biscuits at the bottom of the loft ladder. Mark ate them. Then, when I was ten and finally worked it out and went absolutely spare at him, he did not laugh and he did not deny it. He said, "You were less scared of the loft with Terrence in it than without him." And he was right. He had made the dark thing into a person so it would be smaller. He was thirteen.
He never really stopped doing that. Every hard thing, all his life, he made into something you could shake hands with.
He leaves Clare, and Joe and Freya, and our mother Eileen, and me.
Night, Mark. Say hello to Terrence.
What only a sibling can give
- 1
The childhood. Nobody else in the room has it.
- 2
A trait that shows up at nine and again at forty. That is the eulogy.
- 3
The register you two actually used with each other, including the rudeness.
Questions people actually ask
What do you say in a eulogy for a brother?
Describe who he was before everyone else met him, then show that the same thing was still true at the end. Nobody else in the room can do that part.