Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p> <bold>Background</bold> Following the loss of a professional caregiving relationship, a consistent theme emerges: staff frequently describe their grief for residents as being "family-like." This study interrogates that familial language and asks what it discloses about the complexity of professional grief in care home settings. Foregrounding the language and stories of care workers, this paper proposes that designing grief-literate bereavement services in care homes requires a better conceptual understanding of how staff experience these losses. <bold>Methods</bold> Biographical Narrative Interpretive Method interviews were conducted with 15 frontline care home workers across two care homes in England and Scotland and analysed using inductive thematic analysis. <bold>Results</bold> The analysis identified a form of "family-like" grief among care workers distinct from that described in existing literature. Rather than referring to the intimacy of staff-resident bonds, interviewees' familial language referred to the role their own familial bereavements played in shaping their workplace grief. Three themes emerged. 1) Comparison of Death: dying residents generated visceral parallels with a family member's death. 2) Dual Palliative Roles: staff experienced their professional duties as analogous to the care they felt obligated to offer their own dying parents, generating grief when their capacity diverged between roles. This was expressed most acutely by migrant staff with relatives who were dying abroad. 3) Coping Strategies: familial bereavement equipped workers with tools to cope with the existential challenges of professional loss, even as it normalised the absence of institutional support. Together, these themes constitute the novel concept of "double-duty grieving": the process by which a resident’s death becomes familial through the emotional reverberations they generate across staff’s relational networks. <bold>Conclusions</bold> Decentring the staff-resident bond as the sole source of professional grief forces several conclusions. First, it calls for a better understanding of how professional loss becomes manifest within workers' broader networks of care and bereavement. Second, it demands an understanding of double-duty grieving as a relational labour in which workers mobilise their personal grief to sustain their professional caregiving capacity. Third, it calls on organisations to recognise how they may tacitly rely on this labour and build bereavement services so that workers are not left to perform it unsupported. </p>