Double-Duty Grieving: An interview-based study of care home workers’ professional grief for “family-like” residents
This interview-based study introduces the concept of "double-duty grieving" to reveal that care home workers' professional grief for residents is often shaped not by the intimacy of their bond, but by the way residents' deaths trigger and interact with their own personal familial bereavements, necessitating a shift in organizational support from focusing solely on staff-resident relationships to addressing this complex, relational labor.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
The Invisible Backpack of Care
Imagine you are walking into a room where someone is saying goodbye to a loved one. In the world of science, this is the study of grief, a deep sadness we feel when someone we care about passes away. Usually, we think of grief as a personal thing, something that happens inside your own family or with your closest friends. But there is a special corner of science that looks at professional grief. This is the sadness that workers feel when the people they take care of—like elderly residents in a care home—die. It's a tricky kind of sadness because these workers aren't related to the people they help, but they spend so much time with them that they start to feel like family.
For a long time, experts thought this "professional grief" was just about how close the worker and the resident were. They imagined a straight line: the closer the bond, the deeper the pain. But this paper suggests there is a hidden layer to the story. It asks: What if the sadness a worker feels isn't just about the person in the care home, but also about their own family back home? It's like carrying a backpack that you didn't realize was full of heavy stones from your own past. When a resident dies, it doesn't just hurt because they were a nice person; it hurts because it wakes up old, painful memories of your own mom, dad, or sibling passing away. This paper explores how these two kinds of sadness mix together, creating a unique kind of emotional labor that care workers have to manage every single day.
The Double-Duty Backpack
This study, conducted by Keziah Florin-Sefton, dives into the hearts and minds of 15 care home workers in England and Scotland. The researcher sat down with them and asked them to tell stories about their work, specifically about times when a resident died. Instead of just asking "How did you feel?", she let them tell their own stories, which revealed something surprising.
The workers often used the phrase "like family" to describe their grief. The old idea was that this meant they loved the residents so much they felt like their own children or parents. But this paper suggests that's only half the story. For many of these workers, saying a resident was "like family" wasn't just about how close they were to that specific person. It was about how that person's death reopened a wound from their own family history.
The paper introduces a new idea called "Double-Duty Grieving." Think of it like a worker trying to carry two heavy backpacks at once. One backpack is the professional grief of losing a resident. The other is the personal grief of losing a family member. Usually, we think these are separate trips. But in this study, the researcher found that when a resident died, it didn't just trigger sadness for the resident; it acted like a key that unlocked the door to the worker's own past losses.
Three Ways the Backpacks Get Heavier
The study found three main ways this "double-duty" happens, and they are quite different from what we might expect.
1. The Mirror Effect: "I Can See My Mum in Her Face"
Sometimes, a resident's death feels exactly like a family member's death. One worker, Reyna, was caring for a resident who was struggling to breathe with COVID-19. It was so similar to how her own mother died back in her home country that Reyna couldn't look at the resident without crying. The resident's face became a mirror, showing her her own mother's suffering. It wasn't that the resident was her mother; it was that the resident's death forced Reyna to relive her mother's death all over again. The pain wasn't just about the resident; it was about the memory the resident brought back.
2. The Impossible Choice: "I'm Looking After Other People's Parents"
This is where the "Double-Duty" gets really heavy, especially for workers who have moved to a new country to work. Many of the workers in this study were migrants. They were taking care of elderly people in the UK, but their own parents were dying back home, far away.
One worker, Brianna, felt a huge knot in her stomach. She was doing everything she could for strangers in the care home, but she couldn't be there for her own mother. She felt like she was doing the job she was supposed to do for her family, but for the wrong people. It's like being a chef who is cooking a perfect meal for a stranger while your own family is starving in the next room. This created a special kind of guilt and grief: mourning not just the people they lost, but the care they wanted to give but couldn't.
3. The Survival Kit: "I Got No Support Then"
Here is the most surprising part. The study found that workers didn't just suffer from this double grief; they also used their past family losses to survive it. Because they had already lost family members, they had learned how to handle the pain.
One worker, Abina, remembered asking "Why did they have to die?" when she was a child after her grandmother died. Years later, when a young resident died, she heard that same question from a new worker. She realized she already knew how to answer it. She had a "survival kit" built from her own family's pain that helped her cope with the pain at work.
But there's a catch. Because these workers were so good at using their own past pain to get through the day, the care homes didn't feel the need to give them any support. It was like the system said, "Oh, you've done this before, you'll be fine." The workers ended up carrying the weight of two backpacks alone, using their own scars as a bandage, because no one else offered to help.
Why This Matters
The paper argues that we need to stop thinking of professional grief as just a simple bond between a worker and a resident. It's not just about how much they liked each other. It's about how the worker's whole life, their family history, and their own losses are mixed into the job.
The researcher suggests that "Double-Duty Grieving" is a form of labor. Just like lifting heavy boxes is physical work, managing these two types of sadness is emotional work. And right now, the care system is secretly relying on this work without paying for it or even acknowledging it. The workers are using their own personal grief to keep the system running, often without any support from the places they work.
The study doesn't say this is a solved problem or that there is a magic fix. It suggests that to truly help care workers, we need to understand that their sadness is a complex mix of their job and their family life. If we only look at the job, we miss the whole picture. We need to see the worker not just as an employee, but as a person carrying a backpack full of their own history, trying to do their best while the world asks them to carry even more.
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