I was watching a TV documentary that followed a doctor in the emergency department. He started walking down a hallway to the room where the family was sequestered, antiseptic and cold—no furniture or pictures could ever make it a room of comfort. The doctor looked into the camera and said, “This is the part I dread.”

I knew what was coming—I knew the memories that would hemorrhage—I knew I should stop watching. But I didn’t.

The doctor told the mama her son could not be revived, and the closed captioning read:

[strangled wailing]

Two words. The perfect description of what comes out when your life is ruptured. I think it’s a universal sound—the cry of immense, instantaneous grief…and unbelief.

I know that sound. I know that room. Years ago, it was the ED family room. Carpeted, with a lounging chair meant for sleeping—as if anyone could. Faux-cozy. It was where my family was fractured.

It’s been remodeled since. No carpet. No sleeping chair. Now it’s the lab waiting room. This time, my blood draw fell right around my traumaversary of my brother’s passing.

There I stood, in the exact spot where I stood when the ED doctor, with the chaplain beside him, told us my brother had passed and there was nothing they could do to revive him.

That waiting room revives that moment every…single…time. I don’t know when the waiting room will cease being my wailing room.

Sometimes, this time of year, I go silent. Quiet on the outside, but deep inside—a strangled wailing. A crying out.

The psalmist knew that silence too: “I am troubled and cannot speak” (Psalm 77:4, CSB). But that same psalm opens with this: “I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, and he will hear me” (Psalm 77:1, CSB).

He hears. Even the cries in the deep.

When I can’t find the words, I’m not wailing alone. “In the same way the Spirit also helps us in our weakness, because we do not know what to pray for as we should, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with unspoken groanings” (Romans 8:26, CSB).

And not one tear is lost.

“You yourself have recorded my wanderings. Put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?” (Psalm 56:8, CSB).

And my strangled wailing… heard. Every…single…time.