Nurses’ lived experiences of the death of their significant others in their workplace

Nurses spend their careers at the boundary between life and death, but a new qualitative study reveals what happens when that boundary collapses onto their own personal lives. When a significant other—a family member, partner, or close friend—dies in the very hospital where the nurse works, the loss is not just a clinical event. It becomes a lived, existential wound that reshapes how the bereaved nurse experiences suffering, endurance, and even empathy itself.

The research, published in BMC Nursing, set out to explore the meaning of nurses’ lived experiences of the death of significant others that occurred within their workplace. Unlike conventional surveys that measure burnout or grief on numerical scales, this study used an interpretive phenomenological approach—a qualitative method rooted in hermeneutics, the philosophy of interpretation. Phenomenology of this kind does not ask how often grief occurs or how severe it is on average. Instead, it asks what the experience fundamentally means to the person living it, seeking the deep structure of a phenomenon as it is consciously experienced.

To capture that meaning, the researchers recruited 12 nurses—four men and eight women—who had each experienced the death of at least one significant other in their workplace. Participants were selected through purposive sampling, a technique in which researchers deliberately seek out individuals who have directly lived the phenomenon under investigation. Those willing to articulate their experiences were invited to take part, and data were generated through in-depth, interactive, semi-structured interviews. The interviews allowed participants to narrate their experiences in their own words while the interviewer probed for deeper layers of meaning. Analysis followed Van Manen’s interpretive phenomenological approach, a framework that examines lived experiences through existential themes such as lived body, lived time, and lived relations.

The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Semnan University of Medical Sciences under approval code IR.SEMUMS.REC.1401.280 and conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. All participants provided written informed consent, were assured of their right to withdraw at any time without consequence, and all data were anonymized to protect confidentiality. Participant quotes in the published manuscript cannot be traced back to any specific individual.

From the interviews, the researchers distilled four main themes and nine subthemes that together map the emotional terrain of losing a loved one at work. The first theme, Endless Suffering, captured how the grief refused to fade. It unfolded through two subthemes: recurring memories, in which the sights, sounds, and routines of the workplace continuously triggered vivid recollections of the deceased, and immersion in compounded grief, in which professional encounters with death layered new sorrow onto the nurse’s personal loss. Because the death occurred in the same environment where the nurse continued to work, there was no physical escape from the reminders—every corridor, every shift, every resuscitation attempt could reactivate the wound.

The second theme, Painful Endurance, described the exhausting performance of carrying on. It comprised three subthemes: pretending to be fine, in which nurses masked their anguish behind professional composure; suppressing emotions, in which sorrow was deliberately pushed down rather than expressed; and enduring and carrying on, in which nurses forced themselves through shifts and duties despite the weight of bereavement. The technical term for this masking is emotional labor—the effort of displaying organizationally appropriate emotions while concealing genuine ones. The study suggests that bereaved nurses engaged in intense emotional labor precisely because their grief occurred in their professional space, where the norms of nursing demand steadiness and competence.

The third theme, Failure to Change Fate, expressed itself through regret and futile efforts. Nurses described replaying the moments before the death, questioning whether different actions—faster recognition, more aggressive resuscitation, different decisions—might have altered the outcome. This retrospective counterfactual thinking, the mind’s habit of simulating alternative versions of past events, appeared to generate persistent regret. The subtheme of futile efforts captured the sense that, however hard nurses tried, fate could not be changed—a realization that brought its own quiet devastation.

Yet the story did not end in darkness. The fourth theme, Empathetic Transformation, revealed how profound loss reshaped the nurses’ professional selves. Through identification with others, bereaved nurses began to recognize their own pain in the suffering of patients and families, and through upgrading sympathy, that recognition deepened into a more authentic, more human form of care. Grief, in other words, became a source of professional growth: the nurses who had endured unending sorrow emerged with a heightened capacity to accompany others through death.

The overall arc of the findings is striking. Emotions such as regret and the sense of futile efforts appeared to lead nurses toward painful endurance and, ultimately, toward empathetic transformation. The suffering resulting from the loss of significant others in the workplace was experienced as unending—there was no clean resolution, no moment when the grief simply closed. But the same unending quality, channeled through endurance, fed into a transformation of sympathy. The researchers argue that understanding this meaning is essential for developing targeted support mechanisms and improving organizational responsiveness to bereaved nurses.

Why does this matter beyond the ward? Because nurses encounter death not only as an integral part of their routine professional responsibilities but, at times, in a far more painful and personal manner through the death of their significant others within the workplace. Organizations that treat such losses as ordinary bereavement miss the compounded nature of the experience: the nurse grieves both as a family member and as a clinician, in the same building, often on the same shift. The study’s phenomenological evidence gives hospital leaders, ethics committees, and nursing educators a vocabulary for that compounded grief—recurring memories, compounded sorrow, emotional masking, regret, and empathetic transformation—and a scientific basis for designing bereavement support that fits the reality of nurses’ lived experiences. The research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors, and the authors declare no competing interests.

Subject of Research: Nursing

Article Title: Nurses’ lived experiences of the death of their significant others in their workplace

Article References: Alamdari, M. P., Raiesdana, N., Fakhr-Movahedi, A., & Peyrovi, H. (2026). Nurses’ lived experiences of the death of their significant others in their workplace. BMC Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-026-05289-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12912-026-05289-1

Keywords: nursing, grief, bereavement, phenomenology, qualitative research, workplace, Nurses, lived, experiences, death, significant, others