Beyond 'He Was a Good Man': Writing a Eulogy That Captures Who Your Dad Really Was
The Dead Dads Podcast
Most eulogies describe a man nobody in the room actually recognizes. You know the one: devoted husband, loving father, hard worker, always willing to lend a hand. It's not wrong. It's just not him.
The guy those words describe could be anyone's dad. He has no particular smell, no signature phrase, no catastrophically bad taste in movies. He is a good man — past tense, capital G, period. And somewhere in the second pew, your uncle is nodding along to a eulogy about a stranger.
You can do better than that. This is how.
Why We All End Up With the Same Twelve Words
The cliché eulogy isn't lazy. That's the first thing worth saying. It comes from grief, from exhaustion, and from the genuine terror of standing at a podium in front of your dad's whole life and saying something wrong.
Every force in that room pushes you toward the safe version. The funeral home has a pamphlet. Someone will have sent you a template. There's a clock, there are relatives you barely know, and there is the very real fear that if you go off-script, you'll either fall apart in front of everyone or accidentally say something that starts a family argument. The cliché is the foxhole. You climb in because it feels like shelter.
But here's what the safe version actually does. It erases him. Not through malice — through abstraction.
