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.