What silence have you learned to read?

I've spent years around people who don't talk anymore, and I used to think silence was just the absence of sound. Lately I'm convinced it's a language with its own grammar — the silence in a room when someone's just left, the one in a hospital hallway at 4am, the one that follows a particular kind of news. Have you ever learned to understand a specific silence, something you couldn't parse at first?