How to Write a Eulogy for a Brother or Sister

The Sibling Perspective Is Irreplaceable

A spouse knows the person they became. A parent knows the person they raised. A sibling knows the whole arc — the childhood version, the teenager, the adult — and every awkward, funny, and formative stage in between. That long view is your material. No one else in the room has it.

Sibling eulogies work best when they lean into the shared history: the house you grew up in, the rituals only the two of you remember, the shorthand that developed over decades. The room will hear things they never knew, and that is exactly what a eulogy should do.

Example: Eulogy for a Brother

My brother and I shared a bedroom for the first twelve years of my life. This meant I knew things about him that no one else did: that he was afraid of thunderstorms until he was ten, that he practised his guitar with the amp turned off so no one would hear him make mistakes, and that he kept a notebook under his mattress where he wrote down every goal he wanted to achieve before he turned thirty.

He hit most of them. He finished university, started a business that actually worked, married someone far better than he deserved — his words, not mine, though I agree — and raised two children who somehow inherited his sense of humour and their mother's common sense.

We fought, of course. Brothers do. We disagreed about politics, about the proper way to load a dishwasher, and about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. He was wrong about the dishwasher, and I will go to my grave insisting on that.

But underneath every argument was a fact neither of us ever needed to say: we had each other's back. Always. No conditions. He was my first friend and my longest one. I don't know how to do this without him, but I suspect he would tell me to stop being dramatic and figure it out.

So I will. But I'm going to miss you, mate. Every single day.

Example: Eulogy for a Sister

My sister was three years older, which meant she got there first — first day of high school, first heartbreak, first job, first baby. I watched her do everything slightly before I did, and I learned from every single one of her mistakes. She would have hated hearing me say that.

She was fiercely protective. When I was bullied in year seven, she walked into the schoolyard the next morning and had a conversation with the group responsible that I still don't fully know the contents of. Whatever she said, it worked. That was her way — she didn't wait for someone else to fix things.

She was also impossibly generous with her time. She would drive an hour to help you paint a bedroom. She would spend her Saturday reviewing your CV. She would stay on the phone for two hours while you cried about something that, in hindsight, didn't warrant two hours of crying, and she would never once tell you to get over it.

We were different in a lot of ways. She was organised; I was not. She planned ahead; I improvised. But she never tried to make me more like her. She just stood nearby and caught the things I dropped.

I'm going to miss her steadiness most. The world was more predictable with her in it.

The Hard Part: You're Grieving Too

Losing a sibling is a specific kind of grief. It is losing the one person who shared your origin story — the same parents, the same house, the same childhood mythology. Your grief is personal and it is deep, and you are being asked to stand up and speak through it.

Practical advice that helps:

• Write the hardest paragraph first. The part you are most afraid of saying is usually the emotional centre of the speech. Get it on paper before you draft the rest.
• Arrange a backup reader. Ask a partner, a cousin, or a close friend to stand beside you at the podium. If your voice breaks, tap their arm — they read the next few lines until you are ready.
• Print in large type with wide margins. When your eyes are blurring, 14-point font and double spacing is the difference between finding your place and losing it.

The How to Write a Eulogy toolkit includes sibling-specific templates, a backup-reader agreement, and a delivery-day checklist — all designed for the reality of writing and speaking through grief.