Most training courses have you watch someone do the job. This one has you do it, start to finish, in front of people, with someone experienced telling you honestly how it went.
It runs across both days and it is the heart of the course.
Saturday: you hear a life, once
Wayne tells you the story of a young man. It is not a handout or a case study on a slide. He tells it out loud, the way a family tells it, in the order a family tells it, with the details that matter buried among the ones that do not.
You do what you will do in every family meeting for the rest of your working life. You listen. You write. You catch what you can.
No one tells you what the important parts were. Finding them is up to you.
A family will tell you about their loved one once, in one sitting, while grieving. They will not repeat themselves and they will not tell you what matters. If you can only work from a tidy written brief, you cannot do this job.
Saturday evening: you write it
You have one evening, which is roughly what you will have in practice. From your notes you build a eulogy of no more than five minutes, with opening and closing words you commit to memory.
You look for the theme in his story and build around it. You use his own details rather than warm generalities. And you do not embellish. If the family did not say it, it does not go in the eulogy. That rule is absolute, and it is the one most new celebrants break.
Sunday: you present it
You deliver it to the group. Opening memorized, eyes up, conversational, timed.
For most people this is the first time they have ever done it. Everyone on the call is about to do the same thing, so no one is sitting in judgment. They are all waiting their turn.
Then we work on it together
This is where the real teaching happens. Every eulogy gets a proper response from the group and from Wayne and Rosanne, who have between them led over 2,000 funerals across more than forty years.
Feedback follows rules we set out in advance: truthful and kind, never a criticism without a fix, and never a bare “well done”, because that teaches no one anything.
What comes back is specific:
- Where you found the person, and where you drifted into generalities
- What you missed in the telling, and how to catch it next time
- Whether your opening settled everyone and told them where they were going
- How you handled the hard part of the story, and what to do when it is harder
- Pace, timing, and what to do when your voice goes
- Whether it sounded like him, or like a eulogy
You also learn an enormous amount from hearing nine other people build something different from exactly the same story. That comparison is impossible to arrange any other way, and people tell us it is the thing that stayed with them.
The instructors stood out for the way they shared real-life examples from their own careers. Those stories didn’t just show what to expect — they helped me understand how to be prepared for the unexpected. Storytelling is a powerful way to learn.
Jeanne-Louise AlbertWhat it actually tests
Two things at once, which is why it works. Whether you listened well enough to find a person in what you were told. And whether you can give him back to the people who loved him, out loud, so they recognize him.
Everything else in the course serves those two skills.
No one is certified without preparing and presenting a eulogy. We are putting our name to you, and this is how we know.