Dealing with Grief After Losing a Patient

• Read Nurse guido’s story of grappling with losing a patient and dealing with grief in the aftermath.
• Learn the importance of preparing and protecting your mental health while dealing with grief.
• Understand that nurses cannot save everyone and that dealing with grief is an inevitable part of nursing. 

If I had to assume, I would say that most nurses chose to become nurses because they felt a calling to want to change lives, save lives, and help people in their most desperate of times. We skip lunches, work overtime, miss holidays, and rarely get bathroom breaks – all in the hope that at the end of the day, a patient remembers us as someone who made them feel better.  

In nursing school, we dreamt of all the patients that we were going to help and the feeling of satisfaction when you feel like a good nurse. But what about the part that wasn’t talked about?  

When you give everything you have to a patient who didn’t make it? The soul-crushing feeling of talking to a family member feels like you let them down. Could you have done something different to change the outcome?  

If a different nurse was taking care of them, could they have done something different? Did you offer the family enough support? What about when you feel like a failure as a nurse because you didn’t achieve the purpose of our job – saving a life.  

My Story 

I started my career as an oncology nurse, as you can imagine I learned quickly that not every story has a happy ending. Working on a bone marrow transplant unit, patients would stay on the unit months at a time, meaning that rapport between the nurses and patients became very strong. I would go to work and dive headfirst into the deepest, hardest part of a patient’s life and give everything I had to make it better.  

Whether it was talking to them and providing support, buying them smoothies because it was the only thing they could keep down when they had mucositis from chemotherapy, sharing life experiences and pictures, making them laugh, giving them hope. Most days I would run out of energy and empathy trying to support my patients as much as I could, but there was never a day I regretted it.  

Patients would send cards to the unit telling us how happy they were and how amazing they were doing. They would get their life back, and you would feel the excitement of knowing you were part of that.  

It is such a special feeling. Unfortunately, never every story happened like this.  

I started my career as an oncology nurse, as you can imagine I learned quickly that not every story has a happy ending. Working on a bone marrow transplant unit, patients would stay on the unit months at a time, meaning that rapport between the nurses and patients became very strong. I would go to work and dive headfirst into the deepest, hardest part of a patient’s life and give everything I had to make it better.  

Whether it was talking to them and providing support, buying them smoothies because it was the only thing they could keep down when they had mucositis from chemotherapy, sharing life experiences and pictures, making them laugh, giving them hope. Most days I would run out of energy and empathy trying to support my patients as much as I could, but there was never a day I regretted it.  

Patients would send cards to the unit telling us how happy they were and how amazing they were doing. They would get their life back, and you would feel the excitement of knowing you were part of that.  

It is such a special feeling. Unfortunately, never every story happened like this.  

Grieving a Patient 

I remember the first patient I experienced. She went through multiple complications, infections, strokes, and didn’t engraft after transplant. We made such a rapport that I would pick up extra shifts just to take care of her because she would tell me how happy she was when I was her nurse and how she felt safe with me.  

I held on to that and internalized it and did everything I could to help this patient get better. The day came where she was transferred to ICU for the last time, where she ended up peacefully expiring.  

I’ll never forget the call I got from my coworker to inform me of the occurrence. I was overwhelmed with feelings of grief.  

Did all that time of taking care of her even matter? Every medication gave, the support and empathy given, the relationship with her family that was created. The one thing I was supposed to do – save her – I didn’t achieve.  

I went back and forth on these thoughts for days. The next time I came to work, I had a card from her family. I opened it and it was a letter of love and thanking me for everything I did. I felt I didn’t deserve it because I didn’t achieve the outcome we all wanted. But then it hit me.  

Sometimes it’s not above the outcome itself, but the time in between. Going to the hospital is a scary experience for so many people. There’s a distrust in the medical system, patients are sick, and a lot of time don’t understand what is happening – there’s so many factors.  

I became someone the patient could trust. Someone who could make her laugh in the scariest of times. Someone who provided support when she thought she couldn’t fight anymore. That’s what being a nurse is all about. Taking a scary situation for a patient and holding their hand through it and showing them that it’s okay to be scared because you’re right by their side.  

I still work bedside on the bone marrow transplant unit, but since then I have also become an oncology research nurse. Working with patients in this unique roll has even further opened my eyes. The result isn’t always what matters most. It’s taking the time while the patient is here to demonstrate how much you care about them, it’s treating the family like your own and growing rapport, it’s helping them through the hard times and showing support through the bad.  

The Bottom Line

Death is a part of life, and unfortunately sometimes there is just nothing anyone can do to prevent it. But what nurses can do is facilitate the mourning for the family. Make sure their needs are met, checking in with them to make sure they are doing okay.  

The biggest lesson I have learned is that when a patient passes away, it is not a personal failure. The highest honor of being a nurse is helping your patient get wherever they are going peacefully. Your competence as a nurse isn’t measured by how many patients you have saved but by being there every step of the way, no matter what the ending may look like.  

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