Aim: The aim of this study was to explore situations in daily life that challenge caregivers’ self-image when caring for a dying family member at home.

Background: Caregiving affects the health and daily lives of family caregivers. Patterns of challenging situations may provide insight into the home caregiving experience, thus contributing to our understanding on the influence it has on the caregivers self-image.

Design: Qualitative descriptive study.

Methods: Ten family caregivers who cared for a dying family member at home with support from an advanced homecare team were interviewed 6-12 months after the death of the family member. The interviews were analysed with interpretive description.

Result: Three patterns characterised the experiences of caregivers’ daily lives in caring for a dying family member at home: challenged ideals, stretched limits, and interdependency. These patterns formed the core theme, the modified self. Situations that challenged the caregivers’ self-image were connected to experiences such as “forbidden thoughts”, intimacy, and decreasing personal space.

Conclusions: The caregivers met challenging situations in their daily lives that created a modified image of self. It is important to recognise the impact of caring for a dying family member at home.

Relevance to clinical practice: The present study argues for supporting family caregivers to maximize their potential to handle the demanding everyday life with a dying family member at home. This study contributes to understanding situations in the home that may challenge caregivers’ self-image, and points out the importance of talking about caregiving experiences. From a clinical perspective the present study emphasizes the significance of creating a climate, which allows family caregivers to express thoughts and feelings. Sharing experiences such as “forbidden thoughts” can be one way of handling the profoundly changed every day life.

We used interpretive description to describe how everyday life close to death was experienced and dealt with in families with one member who had a life-threatening illness. We performed 28 individual, couple, and group interviews with five families. We found two patterns, namely, “being me in a family living close to death” and “being us in a family living close to death.” “Being me” meant that everyone in the family individually had to deal with the impending death, regardless of whether he or she was the person with the life-threatening illness or not. This was linked to ways of promoting the own self-image, of “me-ness.” This pattern was present at the same time as the pattern of “being us,” in other words, being a family, and dealing with impending death and a new “we-ness,” as a group. “Striving for the optimal way of living close to death” was the core theme.

Living close to death means an inevitable confrontation with one’s own existential limitation. In this article, we argue that everyday life close to death embodies an identity work in progress. We used a narrative approach and a holistic-content reading to analyze twelve interviews conducted with three persons close to death. By illuminating the unique stories and identifying patterns among the participants’ narratives, we found four themes exemplifying important aspects of the identity work related to everyday life close to death. Two of the themes, named “Inside and outside of me” and “Searching for togetherness”, represented the core of the self-image, and were framed by the other themes, “My place in space” and “My death and my time”. Our findings elucidate the way the individual stories moved between the past, the present, and the future. This study challenges the idea that everyday life close to impending death primarily means limitations. The findings show that the search for meaning, new knowledge, and community can form a part of a conscious and ongoing identity work close to death.