What to write in a memorial message when you didn't know them well

You have a box on a screen, or a card in your hand, and you knew the person a bit. Not a lot. You worked two desks apart for three years. You were the neighbour who took the parcels in. You taught their daughter in Year 4.

And the box feels enormous, because everything you can think of writing sounds either too small for a death or too big for what you were to them.

Write the small thing. The small thing is what the family has never heard.

The family already knows the big things

They know he was a good father. They know she was funny. They have those in abundance, and by the second week after a death they have heard them enough times that the words have gone smooth and stopped meaning much.

What they do not have is the forty hours a week you had with him that they never saw. They do not know that he kept a spare phone charger in his drawer and lent it out so often he bought them in threes. They do not know she always arrived eleven minutes early and read in the car until exactly nine.

That is not a small contribution. That is a piece of a person the people who loved him most were not in the room for.

A shape that works

If you want a structure, this one holds up: say how you knew them, describe one specific occasion, say what it told you about them. Three sentences is a complete tribute.

I worked with Ann for six years. She once drove to Swindon and back on a Saturday because a client had panicked about a delivery, and never mentioned it to anyone. I only found out because the client told me. That was her, entirely.

Notice what that does. It is not eloquent. It has a date and a place and a fact in it, and it gives the family something they can hold.

Things to leave out

• ● Anything beginning "I cannot imagine what you are going through." They know you cannot.
• ● Advice, however gently meant. Grief is not a problem you can help solve in a comment box.
• ● Your own loss, unless the connection is direct and short. "I lost my father last year, so I have some idea" is fine. Three paragraphs about your father is not.
• ● Guesses about what they would have wanted, unless they told you.

On being unsure whether you have the right

Almost everyone who did not know the person well worries they are intruding. It is the most common reason people write nothing at all.

Families read every word. They read the ones from the golf club and the ones from the woman at the pharmacy, and they are often the ones that get read out loud in the kitchen, because they are new. The tribute from the best friend of forty years is beautiful and expected. The one from the bus driver who noticed he had stopped getting on at the usual stop is the one nobody saw coming.

You are not intruding. You are adding something that would otherwise go with you.

If you genuinely have nothing specific

Sometimes you really did just know their face. That is fine too, and you can say so honestly without padding it out:

I did not know Tom well, but he always said hello properly, which is rarer than it should be. I am sorry he has died.

Short and true beats long and general, every time. And "I am sorry he has died" is a good sentence. It does not flinch, and it does not pretend.

Write it before you feel ready

The instinct is to wait until you can find the right words. Most people who wait never send anything, and then feel bad about it for years.

The family is not marking your work. They are counting the number of people for whom this mattered. Write the three sentences, send them, and let the small specific thing you remember be your contribution.

If the family has set up a memorial page, this is exactly what it is for: somewhere all those small pieces gather in one place, rather than scattering across cards and texts and a condolence book nobody reads twice.

Kitty — Kitty writes and edits the Carn journal.