The candy in the toolbox. That's the question we just left hanging — once you've heard the true thing, do you dare say it out loud?
So picture the room. A daughter stands up at her father's memorial. She's holding an index card, and she's about to do the thing almost everyone does. She's about to call him generous, devoted, a pillar of the community. And every person in that room has heard those exact words at the last three funerals they attended. The words slide off. Nobody leans in. Then she stops, looks up, and says, "He used to hide candy in the toolbox so my mother wouldn't find it. And once she found it, and instead of throwing it out, she started hiding it better." And the room laughs. A real laugh, the kind that catches in the throat. And in that single beat, a man who was a list of adjectives becomes a person again — sneaky, sweet-toothed, married to someone who loved him enough to play along.
That moment is what this whole section is built around. The truest tributes don't sand the person down into a saint. They keep the rough edges, because the rough edges are where the love lives. And they make room for laughter, because laughter at a funeral isn't a betrayal of grief. It's grief breathing.
Let's start with the sainthood problem, because it's the deepest trap in the whole craft. When we lose someone, the instinct is to protect them. To smooth them out. To present what BJ Miller and Shoshana Berger, in their TED guide to writing eulogies, warn against directly — an idealized portrait that others won't recognize. Do your best to be honest, they write, instead of presenting a version of the person nobody in the room actually knew. And here's the thing about an idealized portrait. It doesn't comfort anyone. It alienates them. Because the people in that room loved a real human being, with a temper or a stubborn streak or a habit of being forty minutes late to everything. When you erase that, you're not honoring the person. You're honoring a stranger who happens to share their name.
Think about what specificity does in your own life. You can't picture "a generous man." There's nothing there for your mind to hold. But you can picture a man hiding Almond Joys from his wife. That grandmother in the TED example — the one her granddaughter eulogized — comes alive not through the word "kind" but through cheddar-and-mayo sandwiches and sneaking candy bars away from Mom's gaze. The detail is the door. And the honest detail, the slightly embarrassing one, is the widest door of all. Because it tells the room: I'm not going to lie to you today. I knew this person, all of them, and I'm going to give them back to you whole.
Which brings us to the part most people are afraid of. The flaw. Do you actually name the thing that wasn't perfect?
Here's where I'll lean into a real tension, because the guidance isn't unanimous. The TED guide, drawing on the pastor Steve Schafer, says a bit of roasting is fine — but adds two conditions, and they're load-bearing. A bit of roasting is fine if it suits who the person was, and if the family has a sense of humor about it. So the rule isn't "always include the flaws." It's "include the flaws that the person themselves would have laughed at." There's a world of difference between those two. A man who was famously, proudly cheap — who reused teabags and drove an hour to save four dollars on gas — being teased for his thriftiness? That honors him. It says we saw you, all of you, and we found you delightful. But the same man's secret financial troubles, the thing he was ashamed of? That's not a flaw you roast. That's a wound you protect.
So how do you tell the difference, standing at the front of a grieving room, where you only get one take? Here's the test that holds up. Would the person have told this story on themselves? If your father told the teabag story at dinner parties, laughing harder than anyone, it's yours to tell. If he'd have been mortified, leave it in the toolbox. You're looking for the flaws that were really just the person's character wearing everyday clothes — the stubbornness that was also loyalty, the bluntness that was also honesty, the lateness that came from never being able to leave a conversation. Those aren't sins. They're fingerprints.
Now, why does laughter belong at a funeral at all? This is the part that trips people up, because it feels almost transgressive. You're in a room full of pain, and you're going to make people laugh? It sounds like a category error.
But watch what laughter actually does in a grieving room. The TED guide calls humor comic relief, and that word "relief" is exact — it's pressure being let off a valve. Grief is physically heavy. The body braces, the breath goes shallow, the shoulders climb toward the ears. A laugh breaks that bracing for one second. It lets the lungs fill. And here's the deeper thing: when a room laughs together at a true memory, they're confirming to each other that the person was real and that they all knew the same person. The laugh is recognition. It's a hundred people saying at once, yes — that was him, exactly that. There's an old observation that you only really laugh hard about someone you loved. The laughter is the love, audible.
Think of it like a tightrope walker. The reason a tightrope artist carries a long pole isn't decoration — the pole's weight on both ends is what keeps them from tipping. Tenderness on one side, lightness on the other. Drop either end and you fall. A eulogy that's all heaviness crushes the room; it gives grief nowhere to go but down. A eulogy that's all jokes feels like the speaker is dodging the pain, performing instead of feeling. The balance — the held pole — is what lets you walk the room across.
Stay with this for one more step, because the mechanics of how you do it matter enormously. The move that almost always works is to let the laugh and the ache live in the same breath. Tell the funny story, get the laugh — and then, while the room is still warm and open from laughing, turn it. The granddaughter does this in the TED eulogy. She tells how her grandmother boldly told her future husband, "Well, you better put a ring on it," quoting Beyoncé without knowing the reference. It's a laugh line. But it's sitting inside a portrait of a woman defined by gratitude and humility, a woman who gave things away because someone else was more in need. The joke doesn't undercut the reverence. It earns it. You laugh, and in the same beat you understand exactly how much this person was loved. That's the held pole. That's tenderness and lightness carried across the room together, neither one dropped.
So if someone stopped you right here and asked when humor honors a person and when it wounds — what's the dividing line? It comes down to who the joke is for. Humor honors when it's aimed at the person with affection, told by someone who clearly loved them, landing as recognition. Humor wounds when it's aimed past the person — when it's really about the speaker being clever, or when it touches a shame the family is still carrying, or when it lands on a fresh wound nobody's ready to laugh near yet. The same sentence can do either depending on the room and the day. Which is why this craft can't be done from a template. It has to be done by reading the actual room in front of you.
And reading the room is its own skill, one the previous section's listening work feeds directly. When you gathered the stories — when you did the listening behind the speaking — you weren't just collecting material. You were taking the temperature of the family. The chaplain who waited twenty minutes on the phone, the one who finally heard the candy story — she also learned, in that conversation, whether this was a family that laughs through tears or one that needs the lightness held back. That's not in any guide. It's in the daughter's voice. If the family told you the funny stories themselves, laughing as they did, the door is open. If every conversation stayed solemn and careful, walk softer. The research the doctor Alex Lickerman wrote about in Psychology Today, reflecting on his own father's death, points at the same instinct from the listener's side. He said he didn't remember a single thing anyone said at the memorial — what he remembered was what he felt from them. Empathy. Sadness. Concern. The humor only works when the room can feel that those three things are underneath it. The laugh has to sit on a bed of love, or it's just noise.
Here's a gut-check before you commit a joke to the page. Read it aloud and ask: if the widow heard this, would she feel her husband was seen, or would she feel he was being made small? Seen is the whole game. Lickerman wrote that what he wanted, more than condolences, was for people to tell him stories about his dad — good ones, encouraging ones, funny ones, the kind didn't matter — because every story reminded him, or showed him, who his father was. That's your North Star. Not "was this funny," but "did this show them who he was." A joke that shows them who he was can honor him more than a paragraph of praise. A joke that shows off the speaker, or that the family has to wince through, does the opposite, and there's no taking it back. One take. No skim-back. Choose the affection every time.
So strip all of this down and a few things are doing the real work. An honest portrait — flaws and all — beats a sainted one, because the room loved a real person and wants the real one back. Humor is relief and recognition at once; the laugh is the love made audible. The line between honoring and wounding isn't about the joke, it's about who it's for and whether the family can carry it. And the deepest move is holding the two ends of the pole at the same time — letting the laugh and the ache live in one breath, so the room feels both how funny he was and how much he'll be missed, in the same heartbeat.
That candy in the toolbox, then — say it. Say it because it's true, because it'll make the room laugh, and because in the laugh they'll feel, all at once, exactly who he was and exactly what they've lost. That's not a betrayal of the grief. That's the most honest gift you can hand it. A tribute that dares to be funny and flawed and tender all at once tells the room something a flawless one never can: you are allowed to feel everything in here, even the lightness, even the joy.
And once you've learned to do that — to tell someone whole, with all their edges, and make a room laugh and ache in the same breath — a quietly radical question starts to surface. If telling someone's story this honestly is this powerful, why are we waiting until they can no longer hear it?