You’re right that the story of Emily is just that, a story, and so the author is speculating about death and what comes after. I like your attitude about aging and the way you help your neighbor, and I hope you do find that peaceful next stage of life. As for my childhood, I wrote about it in a memoir, Where the Light Fell.

Seven Stanzas at Easter
By John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Thank you, Curt. You have the foretaste.

We scattered our boy’s ashes this week, Tish and Lily and I, on a lake, in the mountains of North Carolina. It was a strange and bittersweet task. Strange: I find it almost surreal to even type the phrase, “I scattered my boy’s ashes today”. This is not a task I ever dreamed I would accomplish, nor one I would wish for any father.
Kappel loved the water … ocean, stream, or lake. It seemed right for his ashes to return to water. So some of them sailed gently away from our dock, with no pomp or ceremony. Some drifted near the cliffs where, as a boy, and as a man, he would dare-devil with his friends, and with me and his sister, jumping from thirty feet up into the deep water below. Some plunged down our “secret waterfall” which, more than once, we dared each other to climb. It was, all of it, a bittersweet release.
Bitter: well … Kap was a physical being, and these ashes were the last actual physical mark of his presence with us. It was bitter to let them go. There are those who might try to comfort me with the words, “well, we know Kap’s spirit is in Heaven. Those ashes weren’t really Kappel.” But, those ashes were Kappel. They were his physical body. And, I know that physical bodies are important. They are important to us, and they are important to God. God came in the flesh, after all, and God’s creation of Kap’s physical body was not just some … cosmic afterthought. And Kap’s physical body was how he connected to this beautiful and tragic world, and how he connected to us … to all of us, in his weird and wonderful ways. When I miss my boy (and I miss him so often), it is his physical presence for which I yearn.
As I type this, I am looking out at a pristine mountain lake. There are ducks calling in the clear green water below me. There are hummingbirds fighting over our feeder. My feisty dogs sit at my feet. My good wife is puttering in the kitchen. This is one of my favorite places in a world full of beautiful places. Sitting here with my coffee, I am filled with joy and gratitude. But, even before Kap went to his new home, even before life’s inescapable hardships began to come, in months and years past, I would look out at this joyful, God-made landscape, and I would experience a deeper yearning for something more, some beauty beyond all that I can see. I believe that yearning comes from God. I believe that God gives me, gives us, that yearning as a “foretaste of glory divine”.
And here is the Sweet: Kappel, too, had that yearning. The yearning to experience deeper, and fuller the beauty and glory and wonder of God, and of all God made, and makes. I truly believe that Kap is, now, joyfully in the actual presence of the God who makes all of this beauty. Kap’s earthly tent (as spectacular as it was) is destroyed, and he is clothed instead with Heaven’s splendor. Those are comforting words in scripture, but, for me, they are much more than words. Kappel’s yearnings have come into focus. But he also waits. Kap waits, along with those who have gone before him, the “great cloud of witnesses”. He waits, almost as if he is on a layover to an even more spectacular destination. He joyfully waits for us, for the day when our loving God will say, “It’s time. It’s time for the new earth”. And that new earth will finally, for all time, validate all of Kap’s, and our deepest yearnings. And, in that very real, physical, God-made place, God will bring Spirit and Flesh and sky and lake and duck and hummingbird and dog together in perfect harmony. We will be overwhelmed, and our tears will be only tears of wonder. And all will be well. And all will be well. And all manner of things will be well.