To examine how everyday identity may be preserved during institutional end-of-life care through personally meaningful rituals, familiar objects, relational continuity, and negotiated nursing routines, while accounting for changing preferences and organizational constraints. Discursive conceptual paper based on a critically selected body of nursing, gerontological, dementia-care, palliative-care, and person-centred-care scholarship. Peer-reviewed literature published between 2017 and 2024 was selected to illuminate everyday preferences, material environments, autonomy, dignity, family involvement, nursing routines, communication, and institutional feasibility. Evidence was interpreted as a conceptual rather than systematic-review corpus; no review-selection counts or pooled claims were generated for this paper. Institutional care can support safety, symptom management, continuity of professional care, and relational support while simultaneously limiting the resident’s control over time, objects, relationships, and ordinary practices. Preserving identity therefore cannot be reduced to reproducing previous routines or documenting preferences. The proposed Everyday Identity Preservation Model treats identity-supportive care as a conditional process of recognition, negotiation, and continuity. Recognition concerns what currently carries meaning for the person; negotiation addresses tensions among resident preferences, clinical needs, family involvement, and institutional feasibility; continuity concerns sustaining or adapting meaningful practices without treating them as fixed. Everyday identity can remain a legitimate concern of end-of-life nursing when personal rituals, objects, relationships, and temporal preferences are treated as potentially meaningful but revisable aspects of care. Their preservation requires individualized interpretation rather than standardized replication.
