Nursing Inquiry 2005; 12(1): 34– 42

Feature

Dwelling with stories that haunt us:

Blackwell Publishing, Ltd.

building a meaningful nursing

practice
Judy Rashotte
University of Alberta & Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, Canada

Accepted for publication 28 July 2004

RASHOTTE J. Nursing Inquiry 2005; 12: 34– 42

Dwelling with stories that haunt us: building a meaningful nursing practice
The purpose of this article is to reflect on pediatric critical care nurses’ experience of grief by focusing on the meaning of the
stories that haunt them. It is suggested that these stories are the nurses’ attempt to find ways to journey through their grief and
to live with the mystery of life and death. It is also the task of these stories to throw light on their experiences, a task that is
never entirely finished. Dwelling with the stories that haunt them helps to provide nurses with a moral structure of critical care
nursing practice. Their reflections upon the meaning of their experiences of grief can lead to a view of death that is not always
perceived as an evil to flee, but is upheld as a source of value and revelation as critical care nurses strive to build who they are
and how they practice the art of nursing.
Key words: critical care nursing, grief, moral nursing practice, pediatrics, storytelling.

While I worked on a hermeneutic phenomenological study
of the experience of grief of pediatric critical care nurses
(Rashotte 1996) I lived the stories of grief of nurses who had
lost to death many of the children for whom they had cared.
I also lived alongside them with my own stories as a pediatric
critical care nurse. Later, I lived with them in a new and
different way as I presented my research in the form of oral
presentations and publications. The responses from the
audiences clarified my thinking and caused me to continue
to revisit the stories. Then, for several years, these stories
seemed to lie dormant. But over the past year they were
resurrected as a result of my readings of hermeneutic phil-
osophy and relational ethics in my doctoral-level courses and
I am dwelling with them once more. It was when I read Ursula
LeGuin’s (1989) Dancing at the edge of the world that I granted
myself permission to rewrite and build another level of
meaning to some of my research findings, not, as Gadamer
(1989) noted, in a sense of superiority, but in a different way.
Correspondence: Judy Rashotte, 217 Knox Crescent, Ottawa, Ontario, K1G
0K6, Canada.
E-mail: <bjpjtigger@sympatico.ca>
LeGuin stated that over the years she had rewritten her
essays numerous times and this current re-collation and
editing had given her back the whole thing — ‘not shapely
and elegant, but a big crazy quilt’ (212).
The intent of this article is to reflect on pediatric critical
care nurses’ experience of grief by focusing on the meaning
of the stories that haunt them. I suggest that their stories are
like Ariadne’s thread. They are the nurses’ attempt to find a
way to safely journey through the labyrinth of their grief and
to live with the mystery of life and death and the uncanny
silence that accompanies the passing of a child who only
moments before was among the living and within their nurs-
ing care. I suggest that the task of dwelling with the stories
that haunt them is to not only throw light on these experi-
ences, a task that is never entirely finished, but also to lead
nurses in becoming more attentive and thoughtful in their
practice. I claim that critical care nurses who thrive in their
nursing practice despite being witness to multiple death
experiences dwell in the art of nursing. For this reason, I
have drawn upon the works of literary and philosophical
writers to help create and articulate this understanding.
Also, I have come to my present understanding of grief in

© 2005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


large part because of my own stories that haunt me, the par-
ticipants’ stories that were told to me, and the reflective jour-
ney we shared together. Therefore, I have chosen to dwell in
the writing of this article from the perspective of ‘I, they, and
we’ which is reflected in the grammatical style of this article.
STORIES THAT HAUNT US
And I pray one prayer — I repeat it till my tongue stiffens —
Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living!
You said I killed you — haunt me, then! … Be with me always
— take any form — drive me mad! Only do not leave me in
this abyss, where I cannot find you! (Bronte 1959, 163.)
In my study, all but one of the nine participants identified
that there were certain deaths that ‘haunt them’ (Rashotte
1996, 1997). They described ‘these stories’ as ones that had
‘affected them the most’, either in a negative or positive way.
The deaths that haunt them were told in stories of great
depth and detail. In the telling, they evoked all the measure
of grief that they felt at the time of the children’s deaths.
Occasionally they stopped telling their stories as their emo-
tions overcame them, but they always resumed them later.
The identification and telling of the stories that haunt them
did not preclude the participants from relating fragments of
other individual stories throughout the interview, but it was
the deaths that haunt them that they wanted to share in
order that their grief could be understood.
I cannot remember if haunt was ever a word that I used
to describe my own stories prior to my research, but the word
resonated with me the first time I heard it and I felt its
significance. Why do certain deaths continue to haunt us
years later? Why do we continue to ‘hang on’ to them? The
various etymological origins of the word ‘haunt’ surprisingly
capture the true essence of the raison d’être of our need to
forever keep sacred our stories of the children’s deaths that
haunt us. Haunt, traced back to its Icelandic origins, comes
from the word heimta, meaning to bring home, go often to,
to frequent the company of, to claim, to recover, and to visit
frequently. The Old French word heimer retained this notion
of homeland, while the Old English word hamettan also
carried the meanings — to shelter, and a path. Finally, the Latin
word habitare means both to dwell and the world (Klein 1966;
Skeat 1974). The word haunt embodies the notions of
intimacy, acquaintance, frequentation, home, thinking, build-
ing and dwelling, notions that help us to understand why the
stories that haunt us are so important in our lives and our
nursing practice.
The experience of the death of a child for whom we have
cared is intensely complicated and hard to recount. When it
first happens, I can describe the death of a child in the unit
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Dwelling with stories
for whom another nurse has cared with far more clarity that
I can describe my own experience. This is because I know
too much about my personal history within this caring experi-
ence. I lack the distance necessary for simplicity. Fulford
(1999) stated that stories, in order to become stories, must
be simplified, stripped of extraneous detail and vagrant
feelings. We find this easier to do with the lives of others,
though, from time to time, we need to do this with our own
history. Inspirited by the thoughts of Rilke (2000) in Letters
to a young poet, I realize now that when I retell and relive the
stories that haunt me in the silence of a distant time and
place, it touches me even more and in a new and different way,
because in the moment of my grief, where everything seems
strange and uncertain and painful, my impressions of the
experience seem to tremble and fade into the terrible noise
all around. But here, surrounded by a powerful new place,
I see things in a new way; I get closer to the nature of the
experience, to its simplicity, even if when asked to interpret
my feelings and experiences, it is beyond words (34).
Stories express our concerns and anxieties, they deliver
moral judgements, and they contain ironies and ambiguities
that we may only partly understand. For those of us working
in critical care, the experience of death can no longer be
pushed onto the margins of our life. There is a strong need
to understand why a child dies, particularly when they are in
our care. We need to create stories that haunt us. In a society
(and particularly the critical care setting) in which there has
been an almost systematic repression of death, nurses who
witness death on multiple occasions need to reconstruct the
possible ways of envisioning their own future. Gadamer
(1996) recognized this deep connection between the knowl-
edge of death (and one’s own finitude) and the individual’s
profound demand of not wanting to know. Therefore, hold-
ing on to and telling our stories are a way to reconcile our-
selves to the reality of death and our own finitude (Rashotte
1996). The stories that haunt us are a stratagem of mortality,
a safe way to find our way through the labyrinth of our
confusion and uncertainty. As noted by LeGuin (1989), a story
‘is a means, a way of living.… It asserts, affirms, participates in
directional time, time experienced, time as meaningful’ (39).
From one perspective, the stories that haunt us seem to
be a means of reaffirming that we continue to be caring
human beings in a highly technical environment. One nurse
recounted that because these children were still part of her
memories, she was not a cold-hearted machine who was only
able to attend to the child in physical crisis. In the telling of
our stories, by having stories that haunt us, we remember
what the children have meant to us. Stories create the means
by which we can continue to frequent the company of and
dwell with those for whom we have cared. Continuing to
35

J Rashotte
transpose Rilke’s (2000) reflections, I suggest that, just like
great works of art, the stories that haunt us ‘resound in our
minds endlessly’. They can be described as having ‘an essence
of eternal solitude’ and an understanding of them is attain-
able when love grasps and holds them and judges their signi-
ficance when they are listened to with one’s inner self and
one’s feelings every time (25). That is why they hurt so much
every time we remember them in a new situation. They are
remembered lovingly, respectfully, for they carry the essence
of who we are as caring, emotionally available, inter-
connected nurses who give of ourselves to others, to carry the
burden of other’s suffering. We need to understand why we
are willing to endure this suffering and to understand the
mystery of the meaning of life and death. Finding that our
everyday, taken-for-granted interpretations of death fail us,
we need to search for a more responsible way of being. That
is, we need to reveal or bring to presence (what Heidegger
(1977) referred to as poiesis) that which has remained
hidden about the meaning of life and death and how we
can experience our practice of nursing more authentically.
Stories that haunt us provide the means through which we
can engage in the meditative thought (Heidegger 1966) that
facilitates this bringing-forth.
From another perspective, the stories that haunt us also
appear to be a critical component of our finding a place to
dwell with death in this world of critical care nursing. We
frequently reflect upon the ‘best’ and the ‘worst’ deaths, par-
ticularly when we are exposed to yet another. ‘In one respect,
it is as if these stories are the gold standard against which all
other deaths are to be compared’ (Rashotte 1997, 383). We
have survived the grief we experienced as a result of the
worst deaths that we have witnessed and we have learned
ways to dwell and be at home with our past grief, to live in the
present and still have hope for the future. When we grieve
the death of another child, we simply remember how bad
our grief has been in the past by revisiting those deaths that
have represented the worst we have had to face. We use the
memories from the stories that haunt us as a healing tool for
all subsequent deaths:
Those are the ones that haunt me the most because they’re
always in my mind.… As soon as I encounter a very bad
situation, they come back.… Just by thinking of them,
they’re there helping me to overcome what has just hap-
pened. So they’re people that now occupy a very important
place in my mind and in my life.… They haunt me for prob-
ably a good reason. Just by thinking of them, they give me
strength (Rashotte 1997, 383).
Citing Aristotle, LeGuin (1989) said that the essential
element of a story is ‘the arrangements of the incidents’
(37). A story consists of a beginning, middle and end. While
a novel progresses in this expected fashion, the stories that
36
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haunt us in nursing are radial, circling about, repeating,
and elaborating upon the central theme. Gadamer’s (1998)
question of beginning lives with me in the writing of this
article. When do the stories that haunt us begin? Is each new
death the beginning of a new story? Can each new experi-
ence of death ever be a beginning if the stories that haunt us
lead us to our present understanding? Rilke (2000) wrote:
‘Don’t you see that everything that happens becomes a
beginning again and again?’ (56). Is the true beginning our
awareness of the real questions that haunt all humanity —
What is life? What is death? Why do we die? I borrow the
words of LeGuin to suggest that the stories that haunt us are
‘all middle’ (25). According to Aristotle, a story connects
events, ‘arranges incidents, in a directional temporal order
analogous to a directional spatial order. Narrative is lan-
guage used to connect events in time’ (LeGuin 1989, 38).
The connection, whether conceived as a closed pattern,
beginning-middle-end, or an open one, past-present-future,
whether seen as linear or spiral or recursive, involves a move-
ment ‘through’ time. A story makes a journey. It locates itself
in the past in order to allow itself to move forward into the
present. ‘Only by locating itself in the past is the story free to
move towards its future, the present’ (LeGuin 1989, 38).
The passing of time is an ally in diminishing the emotional
pain associated with the loss of the children for whom we
have cared. It is a process of the ‘fading of pain’. We live with
our feelings of grief intensely when a child dies and then it
appears as if the grieving is over. After a time our feelings
become less sharp, but, ironically, they are larger too, more
enduring. In fact, our grieving is not finished because we
cannot reconcile ourselves to its reality, particularly if we
have not been able to understand the death. Time allows this
to happen because it is time that provides us with the oppor-
tunity to revisit our past experiences, to dwell with them, par-
ticularly in light of the ongoing experiences that add to our
understanding and offer new appreciations. Time, thinking,
frequently revisiting, and dwelling with our stories gives
us the opportunity to create new meanings. We are never
finished with the past. Just as the past provides us comfort in
the present, the present can help to make meaning of the
past. The stories that haunt us create a path to meaning. They
are the place in which we need to dwell.
Why do we huddle over coffee to tell our stories or hear
those of others? Why did I want to gather the stories of grief
of my colleagues? When we listen to others’ stories we com-
pare them with our own, to find a sense of communion with
others’ experiences, to feel like we are not alone in this
journey to understanding. When we listen we learn by trying
to understand how others experienced and survived their
grief. Can their stories be a lesson for my own survival? Have
© 2005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Nursing Inquiry 12(1), 34–42

the others continued to thrive in their nursing practice in
this environment despite their grief ? Are the stories I hear
similar to the stories in which I find myself a part? Can they
help me answer the question, ‘What am I to do?’ The surpris-
ing thing about the stories that haunt us is that when we
retell them, it is as though we had never seen them before,
and yet paradoxically, we feel in our innermost being how
very much they are our own. When we tell the same stories
over and over they are new, they are news, they renew us,
they show us the world made new (LeGuin 1989). This too
is what it is like to be the recipient of a storytelling. On hear-
ing it, it too feels in our innermost being how very much it
is our own. There is a communion of self with other through
this sharing of the story. When a nurse shares a story that
haunts her with other nurses experiencing grief, it is like a
gift of love. As soon as the story is out there, the nurse is
offering a piece of herself, and in some respects the story no
longer belongs to her. And yet the nurse cannot afford to
hold on to it because in the sharing, there is communion
with another (Frank 1995). As Rilke (2000) noted,
Nearly all our griefs are moments of tension.… We are
alone with the strange thing that has stepped into our pres-
ence. For a moment everything intimate and familiar has
been taken from us. We stand in the midst of a transition,
where we cannot remain standing (74 –5).
It is in the telling of the story that we come to understand
in a new way. The power of the stories that haunt us is like
that of a great literary novel that reveals itself to us little by
little the more often we read it (Rilke 2000).
Nurses who work with death, particularly accumulated
deaths, need to build a place of safety in which they can
think about all other deaths, a place they can visit to reflect
upon the meaning of the big questions (e.g. why do we die?
why this child and not another?) and to discover how it is
that they can provide better care to the children and families
within their care. This is one aim of the stories that haunt us.
They do not allow us to be misled by the surface of things.
They invite us to embrace struggle. As Rilke said: ‘Everything
in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its
own identity’ (61). In order ‘to cultivate’ (Heidegger 1971)
our own personal growth, we must dwell with the stories that
haunt us. We must reflect on the world that we carry within
ourselves. Questions concerning the meaning of life and
death are personal, intimate questions, which in every case
require a new and exclusively personal answer. I would
suggest that those nurses who seem to survive their grief
experiences and continue to demonstrate a deep and caring
relationship with the children and families despite their
numerous encounters with death are those who are willing
to be alone and observant of their feelings of grief:
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Dwelling with stories
The quieter and more patient, the more open we are when
we are sad, the more resolutely does that something new
enter us, the deeper it is absorbed in us, the more certain
we are to secure it, and the more certain it is to become our
personal destiny. When it ‘happens’ at a later time … then we
feel an intimate kinship with it (Rilke 2000, 75).
As a point of illustration most of the nurses in my study
described how they were no longer afraid of death because
they had come to view it in new ways:
Now I don’t necessarily see all deaths as a negative thing. I
mean there’s lots of kids that I acknowledge for whatever
reason, there just isn’t anything that we can offer to them,
other than making their death more comfortable for them,
for the child and for the family (Rashotte 1996, 173).
Death is no longer always an undesired choice in life.
Some deaths are viewed as a release for the child from
physical or emotional suffering and a release for the family
from the emotional pain of watching their child die. Our
dwelling with the stories that haunt us often changes our
attitudes about life and death on a more existential level. For
example, one nurse offered:
And I guess over time I think I’ve become more of a spiritual
person.… I’m coming to really value life. I’m getting to
really see that we’re not here very long so we’d better appre-
ciate each other.… I don’t think I would have come to
appreciate as much as I do now if I hadn’t been here dealing
with all these families and seeing the different grief pro-
cesses (Rashotte 1996, 180).
This is the reason the feelings of grief diminish, all the
while becoming the center of who we are and how we define
ourselves:
The something new within us, the thing that has joined us,
has entered our heart, has gone into its inner-most cham-
ber and is no longer there either — it is already in the blood.
And we do not find out what it was. One could easily make
us believe that nothing happened; and yet we have been
changed, as a house is changed when a guest has entered it.
We cannot say who came; we shall perhaps never know. But
many signals affirm that the future has stepped into us in
such a way as to change itself into us, and that long before
it manifests itself outwardly (Rilke 2000, 75).
The stories that haunt us form as a series of narratives1
in our minds. In fact, drawing upon Frank’s (1995) and
Gadow’s (1995) work, I suggest that those of us who
experience multiple accumulated deaths combine the
uncertainties contained within the stories that haunt us
1 As noted by Frank (1995), ‘since narratives only exist in particular stories
and all stories are narratives, a distinction is hard to sustain’ (188). In this
paper, the word narrative is employed interchangeably with story. It does not refer
to the research method narrative inquiry, ‘a form of analysis that locates structures
that storytellers rely on but are not fully aware of ’ (Frank 2000, 354).
37

J Rashotte
into a master narrative. By doing so we are able to create, in
bits and pieces, a personal narrative that may be more
habitable than that created by each individual story. Like all
narratives, the paradox of a continued relational narrative
through engagement with the stories that haunt us is that it
culminates in a new story of uncertainty. However, in so doing,
it offers us a safer passage and a safer home than can be
found in either one story alone or in subjective or objective
certainty. The stories that haunt me become part of my own
master narrative of what it is to be a pediatric critical care
nurse and who I am as a nurse. The stories become my
dwelling place and I am intended to live in it. It is this think-
ing upon and dwelling with the accumulated multiple,
uniquely varied and faceted experiences of loss that help
me build this master narrative. I have found there is no
habituation to our grief (Rashotte 1996, 1997), but we can
find a home within our stories and our master narrative.
LeGuin (1989), citing the work of Linda Hudson, wrote:
We tell ourselves stories. The likelihood is that we weave the
second around the first, embedding images that we per-
ceive as bizarre in a fabric that seems to us more reasonable.
… I create for myself some plausible account of how this
implausible event has occurred (40).
We are not able to achieve mastery of our grief through
a single exposure to the death of a child for whom we have
cared. We can never know the breadth and depth of each of
the elements of the grief experience from the death of only
one child — elements such as our varied reactions to death,
the situational factors that affect the intensity and duration
of our grief, or the various ways in which we find to cope
(Rashotte 1996, 1997). However, as a result of frequently
visiting and dwelling with the stories that haunt us, our lived
experiences of grief change and create change within us.
Should we be mistaken in our original understandings, we
need not worry, because we are never finished with the
stories that haunt us. We continue to revisit them and the
natural growth of our inner life with these stories in light of
new experience guides us in good time to other conclusions.
The nurses in my study allowed their judgements ‘their own
quiet, undisturbed development, which, as with all progress,
must come from deep within and can in no way be forced or
hastened’ (Rilke 2000, 25). For example, one nurse, who was
still in the process of coming to terms with her first and only
experience of the death of a child, told her story of caring
for this child during the diagnostic determining of brain
death and the subsequent preparation of the body for organ
donation (Rashotte 1997, 384). She described how the with-
drawal of large amounts of blood for diagnostic purposes
made her feel that she had contributed to the death and, as
a result, experienced feelings of guilt and helplessness. She
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expressed how ‘incredibly unfair’ she had found the death.
Yet, several months later she found herself dwelling with the
death in a new way, reinterpreting its meaning in light of her
new experience of caring for an organ recipient. She felt
excited and happy that a child’s life had been saved because
he had received a heart transplant. The philosopher Arthur
Danto has compared the past with:
a bin in which are located … all the events which have ever
happened. It … grows moment by moment longer in the
forward direction, and moment by moment fuller as layer
upon layer of events enter its fluid, accommodating maw
(cited by Fulford 1999, 61).
It is this ‘bin’ of stories that haunts us, built into a master
narrative within which we continue to dwell that allows us to
‘become more and more delighted, more grateful, somehow
clearer and simpler in [our] perceptions. One has a deeper
faith in life, is more content, and has gained somehow in
self worth’ (Rilke 2000, 24).
BUILDING A MEANINGFUL
NURSING PRACTICE
Some form of separation is taking place. Some part of me
is falling away. I am slipping guiltily, even furtively, into
another life. And in another life I could cry out, ‘Haunt me.
Haunt me’, as teenagers we once called out, ‘Haunt me,
Cathy’, to add intensity to it all. But I am not Heathcliff …
nor was I meant to be. I am an attendant.… One who waits,
pathetically, for some rhythm, to bring him back to some
form of life (Hart 1995, 197).
Finding meaning becomes complex when circumstances
(such as untimely, preventable deaths or inadequate treat-
ment) contradict our values or evoke questions about our
role or moral obligations in the situation. In moments of
extreme vulnerability, the original stories to which we have
been socialized and unquestioningly take for granted as
‘truth’ (e.g. death occurs naturally after a long, fulfilling life;
children can be cured in critical care; parents protect their
children) can fail. In these moments, we are taken up short.
As a result, a new narrative is needed (Frank 1995, 139)
and help may be needed to compose it. Thus, ‘the ethical
narrative created by patient and nurses, from the internal
homeland of their engagement, are more than individual
accounts: they are relational narratives’ (Gadow 1995, 12).
In this case, I would suggest that the stories that haunt us are
the patients with whom we engage in an ongoing spiritual
relational narrative when a corporeal relationship is no
longer possible. As Heidegger (1962) noted:
In tarrying alongside in their mourning and commemora-
tion, those who have remained behind are with him, in a
mode of respectful solicitude.… In such Being-with the
© 2005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Nursing Inquiry 12(1), 34–42

dead, the deceased himself is no longer factically ‘there’.
However, when we speak of ‘Being-with’, we always have in view
Being with one another in the same world. The deceased
has abandoned our ‘world ’ and left it behind. But in terms of
that world those who remain can still be with him (282).
Therefore, in the stories that haunt us, we continue our
caring for and moral obligations to the children who died
and their families for whom we cared. We attempt to pre-
serve the character of our relationship with them by recon-
structing it into a positive, productive form (Gadamer 1996).
Gadow (1995) maintained that ‘the very enterprise of
making meaning is conditional, never assured, dependent
on our continuing acts of interpretation, always subject to
the possibility that we may be overwhelmed into silence,
incapable of interpretation’ (10). Bewilderment and grief
can unmake the meanings that comprise a person’s world,
including the central meaning of self as meaning-maker. For
example, a sense of accountability for how a child in our care
died is a painful emotion that we have all experienced
working in critical care (Rashotte 1997). It is experienced
as degrees of guilt ranging from feelings of regret to feelings
of culpability (377). It appears to occur more frequently, be
more pervasive, and of greater duration when we are inex-
perienced (378). It results when we perceive that we have
caused the death, either directly or indirectly, or when the
child and/or family did not receive what we feel is the best
care possible during the dying process (377). We feel guilty
for not having intervened when others in the team inter-
fered with, or caused less than, the best delivery of care to be
offered, if we perceive it was within our control to do so
(377). This sense of accountability is a result of a strong
sense of moral responsibility to the child and family. The
stories that haunt us, built into our own personal master
narrative, offer us a safe place in which to dwell with these
profoundly painful feelings. The paradox that seems to arise
for us when we are less experienced in critical care nursing
is that we do not yet have enough stories on which to build
a master narrative that can offer different contingencies.
One nurse inexperienced to critical care nursing continued
to feel responsible for the death of a baby to whom she had
been deeply attached. There was no objective reason for
having taken the blame for the death. In the telling of her story
she poignantly described the despair she had continued to
feel as a result of not knowing how to cope with her feelings
of guilt. She was consumed by her feelings of professional
inadequacy and questioned whether she should remain
working in this environment (Rashotte 1996).
Returning to the work of Gadow (1995), I suggest that
this inexperienced nurse could not find a safe place in which
to dwell with her grief in the objective certainty of the experi-
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Dwelling with stories
ence. Unless she was able to build a radically new story of
possibility, the disintegration of her world of critical nursing
and self as nurse was a distinct possibility. As Gadow suggested,
‘meaningfulness itself — not just one or another meaning —
is radically contingent’ (10). Storytelling becomes vital to the
creation of meaningfulness, although it is a real possibility
in each situation that meaning might not be created or
voiced. This fact potentially creates an anxiety that will not
dissipate and a grief that will not heal. Gadow contended
that ‘if I can say nothing, if language is powerless or my voice
silenced, then my world ends’ (10). However, Gadow also
noted (and this was emphasized in my study) that nurses
rarely indulge in this presumption:
Most have glimpsed the abyss through a patient’s (or
family’s eyes). Nothing remains except possible engagement
between nurse and patient and family. And engagement is
enough. For without it, the patient or family is alone, no
matter how many nurses are present. The ethical narrative
a nurse and family compose through their engagement
expresses the good they are seeking. Their narrative inter-
prets the situation, saving it — for the moment — from
meaninglessness (11).
I suggest that when we realize we are not able to answer
the real questions being asked in our search for meaning
— why should a child die? why did this particular child die?
— we find meaning through lessons learned from our experi-
ences with those deaths that have continued to haunt us. In
essence we search for assurances that a child’s death has not
been in vain (Rashotte 1996, 1997). Rather the lessons
learned from our dwellings with a child’s death help us to
build a more morally responsible practice. For example,
sometimes the child’s death has been related to how we have
learned to better meet the needs of the next child and
family. One nurse shared that in her early experiences with
death she had been unsure of how to help the family. She
had been uncomfortable being with the grieving family
due to her own feelings of vulnerability and fear of death.
However, she had felt guilty for not having better met the
families’ needs. She described how she was no longer afraid
to be with the families because she had learned through her
experiences with death and from families’ feedback that
her presence was valued. Her experiences had validated her
professional role at the time of a child’s death (Rashotte 1996,
179). For many of us, the meanings we have created have
ultimately resulted in a change in our philosophy of nursing
practice in this setting and a reprioritization of our values and
actions, particularly related to prolongation of life at any cost.
It is my belief that nurses’ grief causes a reflection upon
their practice, questions of doubt about how it could be
better. Their doubt becomes a good attribute. It becomes a
knowing; it becomes a critic. The nurses ask what it is that
39

J Rashotte
is ugly in the care that has been provided. Storytelling
becomes the means of demanding proof of it and testing it,
sometimes because they are perplexed and confused, but
sometimes in protest. But they don’t give in. They demand
arguments (either within themselves or of others). They act
with alertness and responsibility, each and every time, and
the day comes when doubt that came from grief becomes
one of their wisest fellow-workers. There is a sense of hope
in the grieving process; that the meaning they create from
the death of the child and such feelings as guilt, remorse,
culpability, anger and powerlessness will somehow create
something positive in the future.
It also comes to me now that, as part of building a more
morally responsible practice, the telling of the stories that
haunt us is an act of bearing witness. We keep and tell the
stories that haunt us to not only create meaning but to also
ensure the memory of the children who have died. We carry
the hope that these stories will be handed down and retold
so that the children and the lessons we have learned from
them will continue to survive when we are no longer there.
Telling and retelling the stories that haunt us means that
events and lives are affirmed as being worth telling and thus
worth living and serve as a form of moral education (Frank
1995). The stories that haunt us are a way to dwell with the
children for whom we have cared, to dwell in the sense
meant by Heidegger (1971), that is, ‘to cherish and protect,
to preserve and care for’ (147). LeGuin (1989) stated that
‘to tell the story is … a way of leaving a trace, of telling how
someone lived and died. If nothing else is left, one must
scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity’ (27). The
nurses in my study demonstrate that the stories that haunt
them are a way in which they can feel engaged in a meaning-
ful discourse. In the story, it requires that at least one of the
two not be silenced by the situation, remaining able to imag-
ine and voice an interpretation, in order to ‘reconstitute an
internal homeland’ (Gadow 1995, 11). That homeland for
nurse, child and family is the story they create together, the
words of their engagement (Gadow 1995), even after the
child has died. For example, one nurse told the story of her
feelings of death process accountability because of her emo-
tional connectedness to the mother. She felt she had let the
mother down. Continuing a therapeutic relationship with
the mother through the unit’s bereavement program for
several months following the child’s death not only helped
the mother continue the journey through her own grief, but
also helped the nurse come to terms with the child’s death.
As Gadow (1995) noted, ‘In composing a narrative between
nurse and patient, it does not matter who is author, because
each is poet; it matters only that there are enough words
between them to make a story’ (11).
40
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There is no such thing as just a story (Fulford 1999),
because being narratable implies value (Frank 1995). In one
way or another, we see events in the light of our own principles
and values because stories inevitably demand ethical under-
standing. A story is always charged with meaning, otherwise
it is not a story, merely a sequence of events. ‘Some stories may
be unjustly forgotten, but no stories are unjustly remembered’
(Fulford 1999, 6). As Fulford wrote, ‘if a story has been swim-
ming in the vast ocean of human consciousness for years, it has
earned its place’ (6). Stories survive and haunt us partly because
they remind us of what we know and partly because they call us
back to what we consider significant. The story of one child’s
death reminds me of the power of my presence and touch to
support a grieving parent, particularly in a healthcare system
that tries to deny the value of these nursing interventions.
Another reminds me of the need to sometimes defy the rules
of an unjust system. Stories that matter to us become ‘bins’
in which we wrap truth, hope and dread. Stories are how we
explain and teach each other about what matters in caring
for children in the critical care setting. LeGuin (1989) asserted
that telling a story is a social achievement. ‘It is the collective
effort to come to terms with bad events, to distill a moral
knowledge equal to the problems at hand’ (27). The stories
that haunt us tell others what constitutes exemplary care;
caring care; care that is morally good. They tell us what is
considered a good death; what is an ethical dying process.
They tell others what is considered to be good ethical decision-
making and what are considered to be the most important
ethical principles in situations of death and dying. They tell
us that relational ethics are core to nursing care. The telling of
the stories that haunt us is the way in which Ariadne’s thread
takes us to the juncture where facts, feelings and values meet.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
All things consist of carrying to term and then giving birth.
To allow the completion of every impression, every germ of
a feeling deep within, in darkness, beyond words, in the
realm of instinct unattainable by logic, to await humbly and
patiently the hour of the descent of a new clarity: that alone
is to live one’s art (Rilke 2000, 26).
To claim that ‘we lead storied lives’ (Clandinin and Connelly
2000, 187) is to assert that any experience — in order to be
my experience — has narrative form. It has to be fitted into
the rest of my experience with a connecting meaning, a thread
of sense — if only for me. To make sense of experience is to make
‘the narrative connection’ (LeGuin 1989), to relate otherwise
vague and unordered events to my story, the life I am living
as mine. There will always be situations where no past story
(framework) can alleviate our vulnerability (Frank 1995,
139). In these cases, we add another story to the series of
© 2005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Nursing Inquiry 12(1), 34–42

stories that haunt us, to create together with the deceased
patients and their families ‘a fragile new form of the good’
(Gadow 1995, 13). As the stories that haunt us move through
the years, bits of meaning are added and slowly expanded. In
the end, it fulfils Aristotle’s description of a narrative in
which he explained that it demands recognition, something
familiar to us, and also, reversal of fortune (LeGuin 1989).
In the stories that haunt us, reversal lies in the fact that the
apparently meaningless, awesomely senseless deaths of
children have become the center of a story that will continue
to be reflected upon and talked about for many years to
come. For each child’s death touches us in ways that change
our nursing practice and who we are as individual human
beings, perhaps helping us to be more authentic.
The stories that haunt us are private stories. Some we
share with others; some we only partly share in public; and
others we silence. The stories that haunt me are my own
essential stories, the stories I tell myself and sometimes to
others to structure my personal history and to discover and
explain who I am as a nurse. Some of my stories leave me
feeling proud; others demonstrate where I took a wrong
turn and they have left me feeling terrifyingly alone, for to
share these stories exposes my humiliation and worse. But
my ‘bin’ of stories also shows my growth as an individual,
how my failures or those of the system have made me more
mature and stronger in my values, beliefs and actions. The
stories that haunt us express our sense of self — who we are
and how we became those persons, both as nurses and indi-
viduals. The sharing of our stories with others communicates
to them our sense of self as a caring nurse and also helps us
negotiate caring with others because the sharing of the
stories that haunt us are the occasion when nurses coauthor
the provisional but crucial answers that guide what to do next
and how to live now (Frank 1995). Perhaps it is when the
stories fail us or when we are not able to create a ‘bin’ of stories
to haunt us that we find ourselves unable to survive our grief
and thrive in our nursing practice in this setting. For it is the
stories that haunt us that reveal to us a moral thread of prac-
tice that we can then implement in our care of other dying
children. It is the creating of these moral threads that helps
us to develop and sustain the necessary integrity needed to
thrive in a nursing practice in which we continue to care for
children who will die. It is when we as nurses make meaning
of the child’s death in a way that is morally good, that is, that
our practice will become better able to meet the child’s and
families’ needs, that we are better able to come to terms with
our feelings of grief. It is the hope for a better future that
gives us hope for our own Being-as-nurses.
I would be sorely remiss if I ended this paper without
having considered the questions — What do we do with this
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Dwelling with stories
story? Where do we go from here? As a colleague so wisely
pointed out to me, rather than simply receiving and noticing
the stories that haunt us, are we not obligated to do some-
thing with them for the sake of others? Stories are not just
about interior selves but are imbued with responsibilities
toward others. ‘Storytelling is for an other just as much as it
is for oneself ’ (Frank 1995, 17). Therefore, how might we
help novice nurses begin to create, embrace and nurture
stories, recognizing them for the wisdom they embody? How
might we encourage the novice nurse to receive a ‘haunting’
as a home or sheltering, rather than something from which
to flee? How do we prevent nurses from taking their stories
underground for fear of further devaluation? If the stories
that haunt us help us to build a meaningful nursing practice,
is it not our duty to give them voice?
I believe that this story about the stories that haunt critical
care nurses is a call for entering the network of relationships
through storytelling (Frank 2000, 355). We must be responsible
for creating a legitimate space where the voices are invited
to repeatedly tell their personal stories unabashedly and
where there will be ears that hear the words in such a way
that bind and bond us in an act of community, a space where
not only is one’s own story reclaimed, but also where ‘experi-
ences are shared, commonalties discovered, and relationships
are built’ (Frank 2000, 355). This testimonial space would
provide the opportunity to witness the experience of continu-
ously reconstructing one’s own master narrative. As a result
of being in this space of shared storytelling, both the teller and
listener would be encouraged to open up room to imagine
alternative meanings and to clear a path to authentic ways of
being in nursing practice. In this way, each of us who ‘enters the
space of the story for the other’ may ‘change one’s own life by
affecting the lives of others’ (Frank 1995, 18). I propose that to
do any less would make the stories that haunt us meaningless.
As the title of this article reflects, I continue to dwell
with the stories that haunt me, both my own and those of
my nursing colleagues, stories that have built and continue
to build who I am and how I practice the art of nursing. I
realize now that, if I am lucky, the stories that haunt me
will never be laid to rest. Maybe this is just the first of many
rewrites. For those of us who allow ourselves to live the stories
that haunt us, it is a question of experiencing everything.
We must allow ourselves to live the question itself. In living
the question, without even noticing it, we may find ourselves
experiencing.
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