I am a big fan of eulogies. Here’s why they are far more revealing than obituaries

I started putting together a collection of eulogies partly because I felt obituaries were lacking in one key area of encapsulating a life: they tell us what people did rather than who they were.

Obituaries are meticulously planned, tweaked, polished. They have always struck me as having the feel of a CV, and that’s why I find them frustrating: they did that then, had those children, led that army into battle, became that government minister,had that number one record.

Obituaries often end up chaste and bland, even if the deceased was far from that (Lemmy from Motörhead comes to mind here).

Obituaries are often compiled over decades by a sequence of editors. It is not feelings but facts which are key. My father-in-law, an esteemed historian of science, once received a chilling phone call from a broadsheet obits editor checking the sequence of events in his life, which they clearly felt was running out.

Personally, I have always been interested in the fullest range of a life, warts and all. The lives of characters such as Judy Garland, George Harrison and Jane Birkin may well have been beautiful and wonderful on occasion but probably not all the time.

And so I love eulogies because they take up the story after the obituary has been written. There are no rules, no established form and sometimes no logic about who should deliver it. A family member? A friend? A cleric? Or in Elizabeth Taylor’s case, Colin Farrell, whom she’d only recently met. 

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The best ones can be unrehearsed and delivered by the most unlikely person, but work because they are unburdened by expectation. A eulogy can give us the real person. They also reveal much about the person delivering the eulogy. With a famous writer, there may have been a number of potential speakers / acolytes / literary bedfellows jostling for the role, so the eulogy might have the air of “I was their best friend” in their intimate tales. With comedians speaking about fellow comics, the temptation to perform is rarely resisted. 

And they’re often tinged with the bitterness, pain and confusion of losing a loved one, which can sit alongside feelings of love. This is where a eulogy tells us more about a life than an obituary ever can.

The eulogy for the great writer JG Ballard shows us what a wonderful and loving father he was, rather than the author of auto-erotic chiller Crash and other transgressive texts.

Salena Godden’s raw and loving eulogy to Benjamin Zephaniah is honest and pleading, wanting him to improve the world in crisis, “to kiss it better, glue it back together, make it whole again”. A tall order but gives wonderful insight into what Zephaniah meant to Godden.

Of course, we don’t all recollect people the same way, and eulogies can give us this multiplicity. They can surprise and shock but still reflect the person. 

Many of the deceased in my book are people who meant an awful lot to me, so I have been thrilled to find words that convey how I also feel about them. Others less so. In some ways, it’s the less savoury characters who require the most skilful words, which dip, skirt and avoid. 

After all, we have much to learn from all lives even if they aren’t necessarily ones we would ever emulate. The book gives you remarkable words about Cilla Black but also Reggie Kray. I’ll leave it to you to decide what side of this divide Margaret Thatcher and her eulogy finds herself.

A Good Funeral: Unforgettable Eulogies for Remarkable Livesby Daniel Scott is out on 5 November (Quercus, £22).

You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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