In the following passage, the narrator describes her grandmother:

My grandmother kept her late husband's pocket watch in a drawer she rarely opened, and on the few occasions she drew it out she would wind it without ceremony, hold it to her ear for the span of a single breath, and return it to its dark corner. She never spoke of him when she did this, and if I happened to be in the room she would glance at me with the mild, deflecting smile she used to close a subject before it began. For years I took this ritual as evidence that grief had calcified into mere habit. Only later, watching how carefully she avoided letting the watch run down completely, did I understand that the winding was not forgetting but a refusal to let the thing fall silent.