There’s no single way to grieve, but we all feel its weight when someone who mattered is lost.
On January 24, 2026, the nursing community learned of a sudden loss: Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse who cared for veterans at the Minneapolis VA Hospital, was killed in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during a public protest and law-enforcement response.
His death is disturbingly familiar. Around the country, nurses are facing rising violence both inside and outside of hospital walls. The recent killings of Melissa Jubane, a newlywed nurse in Oregon, and Laken Riley, a nursing student in Georgia, have only deepened the sense of urgency within the healthcare community. These incidents are a reflection of a deeper crisis.
Many nurses who have watched video accounts or read news reports have described the same reaction: This isn’t just “a story.” This is a nurse. This is a member of our community.
It reminds us of the human cost these events carry: the grief, the sorrow, the raw sense of loss that ripples outward from a life taken too soon.
The sudden death of a nurse in the news can feel intensely personal for nurses. We don’t clock out of being a nurse. The instinct to step toward to help someone in need isn’t shift-based behavior. It’s a professional identity, a moral commitment, and often, a reflex.
A nurse is always a nurse
If you’ve been a nurse for any amount of time, you know the moment: you see fear on someone’s face, distress in their body language, chaos closing in, and your nervous system flips into clinical mode. Assess. Protect. Advocate. De-escalate. Help.
It’s the same instinct that guides you toward a rapid response alarm. The same muscle memory that makes you stand between a vulnerable patient and harm. The same calm that arrives when everyone else is panicking.
Why this feels so hard right now
This loss comes at a time when nurses are already carrying more than many people are aware of or understand.
Many are living with burnout, cumulative trauma, PTSD symptoms, moral distress, and moral injury — not because nurses are “not resilient enough,” but because the conditions have been relentlessly high-stakes for years.
The pandemic amplified what was already true: Nurses absorb suffering, scarcity, conflict, death, and ethical strain — again and again — often without the staffing, systems, or support that would make that burden survivable.
At the same time, workplace violence has become a painful norm across healthcare settings. Violence isn’t just physical — it’s threats, harassment, intimidation, and the slow erosion of safety through bullying and incivility. Many nurses can list incidents they’ve normalized, being screamed at, cornered, grabbed, punched, sexually harassed, or threatened, because “that’s just how it is.”
It shouldn’t be.
And when a nurse is killed in a public setting, many nurses experience it as an escalation of a reality we’ve been warning about. Nurses aren’t protected. Nurses aren’t safe. Nurses aren’t seen.
A community in mourning
When the death of a nurse unfolds so publicly, it touches something deep — not just sorrow, but a collective sense of exposure. Across the country, nurses and healthcare professionals have expressed not just grief, but a profound sense of vulnerability, caught between their calling as caregivers and the reality of being civilians in an unpredictable and often unsafe world.
At the national level, professional organizations like the American Nurses Association (ANA) and the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) have also spoken out.
The AACN issued a response calling for collective grief and reflection:
“The death of a member of the nursing community is a solemn occasion affecting us all,” the AACN wrote. “In this moment, let’s band together in our grief. We recognize that Alex’s death is especially distressing among the nursing community. We encourage nurses to support each other and seek peer or professional counsel as needed. Our well-being is paramount to our ability to provide excellent care to patients and their families.”
These public expressions of mourning and advocacy underscore what so many of us in healthcare already know: Caregivers aren’t shielded by their compassion, and when violence takes one of our own, it shakes the foundation of the entire system.
Grief in nursing doesn’t always look like grief
If you’re finding yourself unusually angry, numb, tearful, distracted, hypervigilant, exhausted, or unable to sleep, you’re not “overreacting.” You may be experiencing grief layered on top of already-overloaded stress circuitry.
For nurses, grief can show up as:
- Rage because something feels profoundly unjust.
- Numbness because your mind hits a limit.
- Intrusive thoughts because you’ve seen too much already.
- Cynicism because hope feels unsafe.
- Withdrawal because you can’t take in one more hard thing.
- A renewed sense of danger because if it happened to them, it could happen to any of us.
None of this means you’re broken. It means you’re human, and your work has required you to be superhuman for too long.
What we can do right now
We can’t undo what happened. But we can refuse to let nurses carry this alone.
If you’re a nurse reading this:
- If it feels right, speak the person’s name aloud. Naming loss can be a way of honoring it.
- Find one safe person. A trusted coworker, mentor, friend, therapist, chaplain, peer support resource, someone who can hold your words without trying to fix you.
- Let your body discharge stress. Walk. Stretch. Shower. Cry. Breathe. Sleep when you can. Eat something simple. Trauma lives in the body.
- Lower the bar. If you’re barely functioning today, that is information, not failure.
- If you need support, take it. Use your employee assistance program (EAP). Ask for a debrief. Book the therapy appointment. Text the friend. Go sit in your car and scream. You are allowed.
If you’re a nurse leader, educator, or manager:
- Name what happened. Acknowledge the impact without minimizing it.
- Offer structured support. Debrief opportunities, peer support, schedule flexibility, mental health resources, and protected time.
- Don’t demand “professionalism” as silence. We can be competent and grieve at the same time.
- Make safety real: Foster an environment of reporting without retaliation, clear escalation pathways, consistent consequences for threats/violence, and training that focuses on prevention and support — not blame.
Honoring a life devoted to care
However we each process loss, the nursing community is united in one truth: We shouldn’t normalize violence — anywhere — and especially not against those who spend their lives caring for others.
May we honor all nurses impacted by violence by doing what nursing has always done in the face of tragedy: Show up for each other, with tenderness, with honesty, and with the kind of fierce compassion that says nurses aren't disposable.
If you or someone you love is struggling or in crisis, reach out for immediate support in your area or call or text 988 in the U.S. If you’re in immediate danger, call 911.
