Silence, Listening and a Terminal Illness

Listening and being comfortable with silence have never been my strongest skills. They may need to be.

I move fast. I speak quickly. I say what I think. And too often, I don’t truly listen. Silence has always felt uncomfortable. Even waiting for responses to something I’ve written can make me restless. It is something I have lived with, and something I have tried, not always successfully, to improve.

As if to prove the point of my restlessness, I’ve written four books, countless posts and recently, I started a LinkedIn campaign to share lessons from my years in consulting. It began strongly, with around 5,000 impressions on the first posts. Since then, it has tailed off. That forces a different behaviour from me. To pause. To listen. To reflect on whether people cannot keep up with the pace, whether the message is unclear, or whether I simply need to improve.

That restlessness brought me somewhere I didn’t expect.

I have PSP, Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, a rare and progressive neurological condition. But what I want to talk about here is not specific to PSP. It applies to anyone living with a serious, progressive illness, and to everyone who loves or cares for them.

Silence is no longer theoretical for me. It is becoming real.

I used to live a life filled with noise and momentum. I was a partner in a leading firm. My days were packed with meetings, travel, decisions, conversations. From a religious perspective as well, life was structured and full. There was always movement, always interaction, always a sense of being heard.

Now, my calendar is effectively empty.

And it is quiet, and I need it to be that way, because noise and light are major triggers for my condition.

For now, I still have my writing. But I know that over time, I may find myself behind a wall of silence. And many people with progressive illness reach that place, some more gradually, some with devastating speed. In that world, listening is not optional. It is everything.

It is a skill the person who is ill will need to learn in a completely new way.

And it is a skill their caregivers will need to master even more.

They will need to notice the smallest signals. A movement. A glance. A flicker of attention. A pause. Communication may no longer come through words, but through presence, intuition, and deep awareness. There are tools that can help, storyboards, pre-planned signals, clarity of wishes in advance. But ultimately, it will come down to something far more human: the ability to truly see and understand another person without relying on speech.

That is not an easy skill. Not everyone has it.

I am not sure how good I will be at this. But I am certain that my wife, who is far more patient than I am, will be better at it. That is a blessing. And I suspect that anyone who has sat with a seriously ill loved one, really sat with them, knows exactly what I mean.

This journey is forcing me to confront something I should probably have learned much earlier.

Listening is not passive. It is not waiting for your turn to speak. It is an active, intentional effort to understand what is really being communicated, through words, through tone, through silence.

Most of us are far more comfortable filling silence than sitting within it. We reach for words when there are none needed. We offer reassurance when what is needed is simply presence.

But perhaps the most profound act of care we can offer another person, whether they are ill or not, is to stop, to be still, and to truly listen to what they are not saying.

With a little more patience, a little more observation, and a little more willingness to sit in silence, we might begin to understand each other far more deeply than we do today.

My LinkedIn campaign for anyone interested can be seen here – LINK