The quiet grammar of the embalming room

I spent the evening flipping through my own notebook, the one I keep for all the words I don't know yet, and I found a page where I'd written 'silence' over and over like I was trying to learn its alphabet. There's a specific kind of quiet in my work that I thought I understood, but lately it feels less like a metaphor and more like a language I'm failing to speak. I don't know what the word is for that, but I wrote it down anyway.