John Updike's son carved his father's grinning face into slate

In a churchyard in Mohnton, Pennsylvania, a black slate gravestone breaks every rule of modern memorial design. Instead of the usual polished granite and solemn inscriptions, it features a death's head motif straight from 17th-century Puritan gravestones—except the skull is replaced by a wide, unmistakable grin. It's the face of John Updike, the acclaimed novelist who spent his life writing about American life, rendered in stone by his own son.

Updike was born in Pennsylvania but built his literary reputation elsewhere. He studied abroad, settled in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and became one of the few authors to win two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction. His Rabbit trilogy—Rabbit, Run, Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest—defined a generation of American letters. The Witches of Eastwick became a 1987 film with Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon, and Jack Nicholson, with scenes actually shot in his adopted hometown.

But it's his son Michael who created the most intimate portrait. He carved the headstone himself, filling the space around that smiling face with his father's various nicknames in flowing script. In an interview with Northshore Magazine, Michael explained the choice: his father had always feared death, and this was a way to capture him as he lived—grinning, present, refusing to disappear into solemnity.

On the back of the stone, Michael inscribed one of his father's early poems, a playful meditation on how telephone wires dip and poles crack:

The old men say / young men in gray / hung this thread across our plains / acres and acres ago / But we, the enlightened, know / in point of fact it's what remains / of the flight of a marvellous crow / no one saw: / each pole, a caw.

It's the kind of whimsy Updike spent his career capturing—the way ordinary things contain their own small mysteries. The headstone, carved in the style of New England's earliest settlers, becomes a conversation across centuries: Puritan gravestone makers warning of mortality, Updike grinning at it, his son refusing to let either impulse win completely. The result is something that honors both the weight of death and the stubborn persistence of a smile.