This happens in a hospital’s ICU.

The patient’s daughter, a woman from the middle east in her thirties and very limited English, after seeing her father in a bed, intubated, with several syringe pumps, a pacer, several monitoring sensors and more stuff, started yelling a long, continued aaaaaahhh…, took her phone, called somebody, started yelling at the phone in her mother tongue, left the room, left the ICU but immediately after started banging the door to be let in again, she yelled to the phone again, the woman at the end of the line started yelling as well, so that’s 2 women yelling, equally stressed. 2 family members who happened to be there started banging the door as well, a nurse approached the door, let them in, telling them in a stern voice and not looking friendly not to yell, which, to my surprise, worked a bit: the daughter kept yelling, but not so loud as before, the other 2 women didn’t yell, they all followed the nurse into the room.

I froze. This has never happened to me. I thought about hugging the daughter but being a man and not speaking an ounce of Arabic I didn’t know if she would think I was trying to assault her. I don’t know how people from the middle east, presumably Muslims, react to this.

If you ever experienced something like this, what did you do?

ETA: I wrote yelling and not wailing, because to me it wasn’t wailing: Wailing is recognized automatically, it makes you cry, this wasn’t like that, wailing cannot be faked. I was born in a household where appearances were highly valued. One family tradition where I was born is to fake cry during funerals: you’re supposed to show how sad you are by faking to sob and cry, but to anyone smart enough it’s clear that’s fake. My grandfather never loved my grandmother and when she died after 50 years of unhappy marriage, he did exactly that during the funeral.

What this woman did felt like that.