For a son with a huge heart
Our son Eli never met a stray anything he didn't bring home. Dogs, cats, a one-winged crow named Steve, and — more than once — classmates who needed dinner and somewhere calm to do homework. We used to joke that our grocery bill was a charity. He heard the joke, and at nine years old he answered it: 'Everybody's somebody's, Mom.' Nine years old. We should have written it down, but we didn't need to — he spent the next nineteen years writing it everywhere. In the shelter where he worked weekends. In friendships with kids nobody else sat with. In the way this room is full of people from every corner of his life who each believed they were his best friend. You were all right. Everybody was somebody's to Eli. And he was ours. He will always be ours.
Why it works: His own childhood sentence becomes the spine of the tribute, letting the son speak at his own service.
Customize it: Find the sentence your son said young that turned out to be his whole character, and show two places he lived it out.