Beyond Caregiver Burden: Family Caregiving in Lung Transplantation as a Liminal Descent

Family caregivers are central to lung transplantation, yet their experiences are often framed through the language of burden, needs, or support. While important, these framings may obscure how caregiving reorganises everyday life, embodied wellbeing, social recognition, and selfhood. This interpretive phenomenological study explored the lived meanings of family caregiving in lung transplantation through in-depth interviews with 31 adult family caregivers of lung transplant recipients in Spain. Analysis followed a phenomenological-hermeneutic movement from naïve understanding to structural analysis and comprehensive interpretation. Parse’s Human Becoming informed the interpretive orientation. The myth of Inanna’s descent was introduced only in the final interpretive phase as a heuristic device to communicate patterns already grounded in participants’ accounts. The findings show caregiving as a liminal descent across seven interrelated domains of progressive relinquishment: time, body, paid work, social life, recognition, autonomy, and identity. The “return” was not a restoration of the pre-transplant self, but a quiet reconfiguration made possible through relational support, recognition, and professional responsiveness. The study contributes to nursing knowledge by offering an interpretive language for recognising forms of caregiver suffering and endurance that remain difficult to see within conventional burden-based accounts.