Words of comfort in the funeral
Words of comfort are a crucial section of the funeral ceremony. They reflect on grief and loss, while providing encouragement and comfort that it won’t always feel this way. There are lots of different ways of creating this section; I tend to stick to stealing borrowing from other much-more-talented-than-me writers.
I have a massive ceremony script template that I’ve built over my years as a celebrant. It has all the sections of the ceremony laid out in order. Under each section’s subheading it has lots of bits of words I’ve collected over the years. Some I’ve written myself, some I’ve found in celebrant Facebook groups, and some I’ve pinched borrowed from books/poems/essays.
When I’m developing the words of comfort section for a specific funeral, I’ll scroll through my template, pick one of the paragraphs that I think fits the deceased and the situation pretty well, and adjust as needed. Sometimes I don’t have anything that says what I want to say so I write something brand new. To be honest that doesn’t happen very often. Pretty much anything I could come up with has probably already been said, and already been said way better than I could say it.
I don’t feel bad about using similar wording in multiple ceremonies. If they’re the right words of comfort for that person, that death, and that situation, and if I’m comfortable saying them, they’re going to get used often.
So that’s it! That’s my process for developing the words of comfort in the funeral ceremony.
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