You have 40 years of material and 4 minutes, and your parents are in the front row.

Nobody in that room needs to be told who you are. That is the one advantage a brother has, and it saves you the opening sentence everybody else has to spend. What it costs you is everything after it.

You have 40 years of shared rooms, cars, arguments, jokes and Christmases. Most of it is private, quite a lot of it is only funny if you were there, and none of it arrives in an order. So you sit at the table making a list, the list gets to 30 items, and you stop. The problem is selection, not memory.

Two scenes, told properly, beat 20 mentioned in passing.

Pick 2 scenes, not a montage

A montage is a list of things he did. A scene has a place, a time of year, and one action. The room can hold 2 scenes and remember them on the drive home. It cannot hold 9.

• one from before either of you was a personSomewhere in the years when you were both children and the whole world was one house and one street. Not the funniest story. The most specific one. The bike, the wall, the airing cupboard, the thing you broke and blamed on each other for 30 years. Say what room it happened in.
• one from after you were both adultsThis is the scene that does the real work, because it shows the room what the two of you became. A phone call, a drive, a hospital car park, the day he turned up when he did not have to. It is nearly always small and it is nearly always him arriving somewhere.
• one line about the version of him you did not haveHis wife had a husband, his children had a father, his friends had someone who was different at 11pm on a Friday. Name that in one sentence and hand it to them. “I got the brother. Sarah got the man he decided to be.” It takes 8 words and it stops the speech from being a claim of ownership.

Your parents are burying a child

This is the fact that makes a brother’s eulogy different from every other page on this site. Two people in the front row are living through the thing they were never supposed to outlive. Your job at the lectern is not to describe your own grief to them. They can see it.

So give them one thing they did not know. Parents know the school reports and the jobs and the wedding. They very often do not know that he was kind when nobody was watching. If you have a story about that, it belongs in this speech more than anything clever.

Mum, Dad, there is something about him you probably never heard, because he would not have told you. He drove 90 miles on a Tuesday to sit with a friend who had nobody, and he did it for 3 months, and he never mentioned it once.

the paragraph aimed at the front row, said to them by name

Where a laugh is safe

A brother’s eulogy is the one funeral speech that can carry real humour, and the room usually needs it from you specifically. Everyone else will be careful. You are allowed not to be, once.

Put it in the first childhood scene, not at the end, and never anywhere near how he died. A laugh early tells 90 people they are permitted to be human for the next hour. A laugh at the close leaves the room in the wrong place. If it will not be sad the whole way through, a eulogy that is not all sad covers how far that can go.

What to leave out

• the running joke that needs 3 minutes of setupIf you have to explain it, it belongs at the reception, told to 4 people who were there. A eulogy is not the place for a story with an audience of 3.
• the fight, unless it endedIf you fell out and came back, that is one of the strongest things you can say, in 2 sentences, without detail. If you fell out and never fixed it, that is not a lie you have to tell either. Your relationship with him was complicated is the page for that, and it has the actual sentences.
• anything his children should not hear at 9 years oldThey are in the second row and they will remember this speech for 40 years. The drinking, the divorce, the year nobody talks about. Not today, not from you.
• the eulogy for the whole familyYou are not speaking for your mother, your other siblings or his wife. Speak as yourself. If several of you want to be in it, ask each of them for one line and read it with their name attached.

How to end it

The last line of a brother’s eulogy is almost always the shortest sentence in it, and it is said to him rather than about him. Do not build to a summary of his life. Turn and say the thing only you are allowed to say.

You were the only person who remembered any of this with me. I do not know who I am supposed to call now.

when you were close

We had 6 good years at the end and I am going to be grateful for them for the rest of my life. Night, mate.

when it was repaired

3 to 4 minutes is right. If he was young, or it was sudden, the shape changes and when it was too soon is the page for that. If you cannot get through the reading itself, how to get through it without breaking down is the practical one.

• How do you write a eulogy for a brother?

  Skip the introduction, because everybody knows who you are. Choose 2 scenes with a place and an action, one from childhood and one from adulthood, and give one sentence to the version of him his wife and children had. Say one thing your parents did not know. End with a short line said directly to him. Aim at 3 to 4 minutes.

• Is it acceptable to be funny in a eulogy for a brother?

  Yes, and it is often expected from a brother when it is expected from nobody else. Put the humour in the childhood scene, early, and keep it away from the death and away from the last line. One laugh in the first minute gives the room permission to breathe.

• What do I say about my brother in front of our parents?

  Give them something they did not know, ideally proof that he was kind when nobody was watching. Say it to them by name, in one short paragraph, and do not describe your own grief to them at length. They already know how it feels and they cannot carry yours as well today.