How to Write a Eulogy for Your Best Friend

Best friend is a phrase that gets stretched to cover a lot of different relationships. Take a moment to name, in your own head, what kind of best friend this person actually was.

The best friend you grew up with. The best friend you met as adults. The best friend who lived two streets away your whole life. The best friend you only ever saw twice a year but who you somehow always picked up with mid-sentence.

Knowing the shape of the friendship helps you write the eulogy. The room will recognise the shape when you describe it. "We were the kind of friends who did not need to talk every week, but always knew exactly where the other one was emotionally the moment we picked up the phone." That is a real shape. Find yours.

Before you talk about the friendship, acknowledge the family. Briefly. The family chose to give you this microphone, and they are sitting in the front row.

"To his parents, his brothers, his wife and his children. Thank you for trusting me to say something today. He was the best friend any person has ever had, and I am here partly so you can hear that from someone who was not in the family."

Something like that. Then say who you are and how long you knew him.

Specific small things. The eulogy for a best friend is not about how close you were. It is about who he or she was, told through the eyes of someone who got to see closer than most.

Not "she was the best friend anyone could ask for." Show it. "She remembered every birthday in my family for twenty years and never let me forget mine. She showed up at every important moment of my life, often before I knew I needed her there. She told me, on three separate occasions, hard truths about myself that nobody else would have dared to tell me, and she was right every time."

Not "we shared everything." Pick one moment. The road trip. The phone call at the worst hour of your life. The wedding. The thing you did together at twenty-two that you both still laughed about at fifty.

Two or three of those moments and the room sees the friendship.

Acknowledge the family, briefly. Say who you are.

Name the kind of friendship it was. One or two sentences.

Say who he or she was, told through your friendship. Three to five sentences.

Tell two or three small specific stories. The trip, the phone call, the moment that captures the friendship.

Close by giving the friendship back to the family. "He was yours first. The world is luckier because he had so much friendship in him that it overflowed onto the rest of us."

Then sit down.

Avoid making it about how close the two of you were and how much you will miss him or her. The room knows. Show the friendship through specific scenes. Let the room feel the closeness through what you describe, not through how often you say "best friend."

Avoid the long inside-joke list. Pick one. Set it up. Trust the room.

Avoid airing private things the family did not know. If you are unsure, ask one family member in advance.

Avoid sympathy card phrases. Plain language from a best friend is more powerful than ornament.

Three to four minutes for a best friend's eulogy. About four hundred to five hundred words.

Family eulogies will likely be longer. Yours sits inside theirs. Keep it focused and clean. The room will not measure the friendship by how long you spoke.