Throughout the First World War, it was relatively common for Australian nurses to write condolence letters to the families of patients who had died under their care. This was a self-imposed task undertaken in their precious time off duty. It required considerable skill and empathy to simultaneously provide the details of death the mourning family craved, and engender a sense of closure and comfort. Letters provided the necessary space to skilfully manage the nature of the information and feeling expressed in them; that is, to soften the blow of a traumatic and premature death in wartime. Writing letters with such care and attention to the emotional wellbeing of its recipients was a form of emotional labour. Through closely analysing a collection of condolence letters, this paper will examine the different manners of constructing such complex letters, and in so doing, explore the concept of condolence letters as emotional labour performed by Australian nurses. These acts of emotional labour explore history on an intimate scale, providing insight into the highly personal experience of making sense of the death of their patients amidst the mass-scale loss of life during the First World War.