Clock

My grandfather's clock did not stop, short, never to go again when the old man died. But it did share his arrhythmia - tock followed tick after a pause long enough to repeatedly convince the listener that, yes, this time, it had really stopped. Tick then hurried to make up for lost time.

The clock did finally stop, some years after my grandfather's ticker tocked its last. It had been tinkered with and restarted a couple of times but, eventually, it could not be persuaded to keep working.