The Eulogy Is Dying. And It Might Be Taking the Funeral With It.

October 21, 2026

A funeral director said something on LinkedIn recently that stopped me cold.

"People just aren't doing eulogies anymore."

No alarm. No outrage. Just a quiet observation from someone who has stood at more bedsides and gravesides than most of us will in a lifetime. It landed like a stone in still water — and I haven't been able to stop thinking about the ripples.

Because if that's true, something profound is being lost. Quietly. Without much of a fight.

The Numbers Back It Up

This isn't anecdote. The data tells the same story.

According to the National Funeral Directors Association, 41% of US cremations are now direct cremations — meaning no service, no gathering, no eulogy. Nothing. That's roughly 800,000 families per year saying goodbye without a room full of people, without shared stories, without any formal marking of a life that was lived.

And direct cremation is only part of the picture. The NFDA also reports that 76% of cremations now involve no service before cremation at all. Meanwhile, the US cremation rate sits at 63.4% of deaths in 2025 — projected to reach 81.4% by 2045.

The trajectory is clear. The traditional funeral — and the eulogy at its heart — is in quiet freefall.

Why Families Are Opting Out

Cost is part of the story. When a family is already overwhelmed by grief and logistics, a $1,500 direct cremation versus an $8,000 full-service funeral is a powerful signal. Financial pressure is real, and it matters.

But there's something else happening — something less visible, and possibly more significant.

The eulogy is hard to write.

Not hard in the way that calculus is hard. Hard in a different, more human way. You are exhausted. You are in the worst week of your life. You are fielding phone calls, managing travel logistics, and trying to hold your family together — and somewhere in the middle of all of that, someone expects you to sit down with a blank page and find the right words to describe someone irreplaceable.

Many families don't manage it. Not because they don't want to honour their person — but because the blank page, in that moment, is simply too much.

So they quietly let it go. And when the eulogy goes, does the service go with it?

What We Lose When the Eulogy Disappears

There's a tendency to treat the eulogy as optional. A nice-to-have. A tradition that some families observe and others don't, and who's to say either way?

But the research says otherwise.

A peer-reviewed study published in Death Studies found that a positive experience of funeral ritual was associated with less intense grief reactions — not just immediately, but three years later. Research published in Frontiers in Psychology found that funeral rituals "contribute substantially to the psycho-spiritual and physical health of the recently bereaved." A mixed-methods review from PubMed Central found that funerals "facilitate the offering of social and psychological support to the bereaved, and afford an opportunity to convey love and respect for the deceased."

These aren't small effects. They last.

And the eulogy is the centre of all of it. It's the moment when the room exhales. When someone says the thing everyone was feeling but couldn't quite name. When a stranger learns something that reframes everything they thought they knew about the person in the casket. When a grandchild laughs for the first time in a week because they finally heard the story about the fishing trip.

The eulogy is when a room full of separate, lonely grief becomes something shared.

That's not ceremony for ceremony's sake. That's the power of connection.

A Theory Worth Considering

We've been sitting with a question we can't quite shake: what if the eulogy's decline isn't just a symptom of simpler funerals — what if it's quietly contributing to them?

Think about it from a family's point of view. When you imagine a funeral, what are you actually imagining? For most people, it's not the flowers. It's not the casket or the paperwork. It's the moment someone stood up and said something true and beautiful about the person you lost. The stories. The laughter. The tears that felt, somehow, like relief.

That moment is the eulogy.

Now imagine planning a service without one. Without knowing what to say, or who would say it, or how to get the words out — the whole thing starts to feel like an obligation. A formality. Something you endure rather than something you need.

And people don't tend to travel, take time off work, and organize their lives around obligations.

We wonder — genuinely wonder — whether the difficulty of the eulogy is quietly discouraging families from holding services at all. Whether removing that barrier might, in some small way, bring people back to the gathering. Back to each other. Back to the room where healing actually happens.

It's a theory. But it feels like one worth saying out loud.

The Resurrection

Here's what we know: the desire was never the problem.

Families want to honour the people they've lost. They want the stories told. They want to stand in a room and feel the weight of a life that mattered. The barrier — almost always — is the blank page.

That's the only thing TreulogyAI was built to solve.

Through a warm, guided conversation, TreulogyAI helps families draw out their memories and transforms them into a beautiful, personalized eulogy — in about an hour. No writing experience required. No staring at a cursor. Just questions that feel like a conversation, and words that sound like the family actually wrote them. Because in every way that matters, they did.

When the words come more easily, families show up. And when families show up, something meaningful happens in that room.

The eulogy doesn't have to disappear. It just needs the spotlight again.

Quick Poll

At your funeral home, are families choosing to have a eulogy less often than they were 5 years ago?

Yes — noticeably less often

Somewhat — it feels like a gradual shift

No — about the same as always

Actually, more families are asking for help with eulogies

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