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Iowa City nurses start new Nurse Honor Guard to pay tribute in funerals, memorial services
New honor guard joins others in the Corridor recognizing the profession and its impact
Sep. 4, 2025 6:00 am, Updated: Sep. 4, 2025 12:44 pm
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IOWA CITY — For tens of thousands of nurses in Iowa, caring for patients around the clock is more than a job option or career path.
It’s a lifestyle. It’s a way of living.
But most importantly, nursing is a life calling. And now, nurses are being honored for it after their deaths.
In recent years, the formation of nurse honor guards around the Corridor have reinforced that recognition for the departed who dedicated their lives to serving others — in sickness and health.
The most recently formed ensemble, the Iowa City Nurse Honor Guard, brings another service to Johnson County.
What honor looks like
For the Corridor’s newest group, it means naming the ways nurses made a critical difference — being quiet and outspoken, gentle and firm, realistic and supportive.
With a group of several volunteers in traditional white nursing uniforms complete with hats and capes, nurses perform brief ceremonies during funerals or memorial services with objects of symbolism, simple gestures and an empathy rooted in life experience.
Organizer Bunny Morrison recited the Nightingale Tribute, named after Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing. It narrates how nurses honored patients by spending their lives being there:
- “When a calming presence was all that was needed.”
- “In the excitement and miracle of birth, or in the mystery and loss of life.”
- “When a silent glance could uplift a patient, family member or friend.”
- “At those times when the unexplainable needed to be explained.”
- “When a situation demanded a swift foot and sharp mind.”
- “When a gentle touch, a firm push or an encouraging word was needed.”
- “To witness humanity and its beauty in good times or bad, without judgment.”
- “To embrace the woes of the world willingly and offer hope.”
In this way, nurses who have passed are honored not only for how they spent their careers, but for how they made a difference by stepping into people’s lives.
At the end of each ceremony, nurses are released from their duties after a life well served. Some honor guards call them by name; others add their nursing license number as well.
History of nurse honor guards
Building on a foundation of similar honors performed for funerals of firefighters, police officers and members of the military, nursing honor guards started in 2003 with the Nightingale Tribute by the Kansas State Nurses Association.
The Iowa City Nurse Honor Guard, founded by Iowa City retirees of Mercy and the University of Iowa, started performing services in September 2024.
UnityPoint Health — St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids have performed 20 honors since starting in 2020. Mercy in Cedar Rapids offers the service as well.
All three in the Corridor offer them at the request of families within a 50-mile radius.
After seeing the honors for other professions, it helps raise the profile of a profession under more systemic stress since the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s an honorable, commendable profession. People should be honored for giving so much of their time and lives to helping others,” said funeral director Libby Splichal. “We’re so glad that this started here in Johnson County.”
How they started in Eastern Iowa
The Iowa City guard, long seen as a need by several nurses involved, gained momentum after members saw the service in action at the funerals of friends and relatives
“There were 30 nurses that came in procession and did this ceremony,” member Lynn Vining said after seeing it two years ago. “I thought, ‘I need to be part of that.’”
UnityPoint Health’s honor guard in Cedar Rapids started in January 2020 to honor Elaine Young, a nursing leader of 50 years in Cedar Rapids. Since then, the effort has grown with new volunteers after each successive ceremony.
Carmen Kleinsmith, chief nursing officer at St. Luke’s, said the emotion and camaraderie witnessed by nurses and relatives at each ceremony is moving.
“Nursing is a science and an art. You have this bond with those who have lived through the profession with you,” Kleinsmith said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a cardiac nurse, labor and delivery, emergency department ... we all have that same bond. Oftentimes, in that profession, you give quite a bit of yourself to that and a lot to the team you work with.”
For the 27 nurses in her guard, she said it’s a unifying opportunity to recognize the tradition of nursing and those who have dedicated their lives to it.
Why it matters
Founders of the Iowa City guard, each with over 40 years of experience, said it brings awareness to those who may not realize the extent of a nurse’s sacrifices — working odd hours, being on call, being called in inclement weather and being subject to some abuse from patients.
“Unless you’re a nurse, you don’t know all these things,” Morrison said. “It brings increased awareness for the significance of nursing in people’s lives.”
“Violence is incredible in health care settings,” Vining added.
And for families, it complements a sense of closure.
“Seeing the responses of people who we have been able to do the service for has been phenomenal,” she said.
The difference between a career and a calling, Vining said, is care.
“You can’t make people care. All of us that have gone into nursing are truly caring about that (patient) and their best outcome,” she said.
Nurses help bring people into the world, keep them in good health throughout their lives and assist them as they leave this earth.
And now, nursing honor guards mean the world to the families nurses leave behind.
Comments: Features reporter Elijah Decious can be reached at (319) 398-8340 or elijah.decious@thegazette.com.
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