hard · Act reading

The following passage is from a memoir. For years I had described my grandmother's silence as stubbornness, a refusal to share the country she had left behind. When I finally pressed her about it, she did not bristle as I expected. She set down her knife, looked past me toward the window, and said only that some doors are kept shut not because they are locked but because the room behind them is still on fire. I understood then that what I had read as withholding had been a kind of mercy, an effort to keep me from the heat she carried alone. I had spent my childhood resenting a wall and never once considered the person bracing it from the other side. The central insight the narrator reaches in this passage is that:

1. the grandmother's silence, which the narrator had misjudged as stubborn withholding, was actually a protective act of self-sacrifice.
2. the grandmother refused to discuss her homeland because doing so would reveal secrets she had promised others to keep.
3. the narrator's childhood resentment was justified, since the grandmother truly had chosen to exclude the family from her past.
4. the grandmother had finally decided she was ready to share the painful history of the country she had left behind.

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