A rare moment of surrealism in an Alice Munro story

Joked w/ J's b-f M, lover of pro football esp Oakland Raiders and video games, looked at large book on dining room table and asked about it - Alice Munro 1996 Selected Stories - and I told him the book probably wasn't for him, but the Alice Munro video game is awesome: here comes that Methodist minister over the horizon - blam! - and here's that Carstairs, Ontario, spinster librarian - Pow! - and that buggy-shop owner on the shores of Lake Huron - Kapow! And yet, and yet - isn't there a surprising amount of violence in Munro's stories, so placid and elegant in tone and mode, but concealing great reserves of emotion and violence and death and betrayal. Like the long (3 sections) story about the above-referenced librarian in the small town, living in the "commercial hotel" - in some ways, for Munro, a simple plot: during the First World War librarian receives mash-y letters from GI in Europe who'd eyed her on the job, and they begin seriously flirting via mail, she sends him a picture - kind of expects to see him after the war, never does, she thinks he's ashamed or shy, then reads in paper that he has married - we learn he had a sweetheart/fiancee in town all along - so why did he start this rather cruel fake courtship? (Interesting how the other Alice, whom I've just read, echos this theme in her novel Someone.) Then - we jump forward a # of years - we see the librarian lose her virginity to a traveling salesman who's staying at the hotel - surprising she is still a virgin (was surprising to him) but maybe that's true of the time - and, there's a terrible accident, the ex-GI is beheaded when he gets caught in a buzzsaw machine at the factory where he works. The factory owner comes to pay condolence to the widow, and she gives him a pile of books to return to the library. So the ex-GI had been going to the library all these years! And when he returns the books - in a cute plot twist atypical of the hard-edged Munro, he, too, falls for the librarian, and eventually they marry. What any reader will remember about this story, however, is Munro's vivid description of the gory accident in the (piano and organ) factory. Blam! And what puzzles me in particular is the final section of the story, in which the librarian on a visit to Toronto imagines (I guess) seeing the beheaded man, Jack Agnew, come back to life and addressing her, as she waits for a bus. What's this about? Is she in dementia? Just dreaming? Or did I miss some vital clue - is there a way in which he did not die, or he has a son or relative bearing his name? I was puzzled by this "vision," also atypical of Munro, the staunch realist. But Munro is known, more than anything, for breaking rules, expectations, and conventions - even those of her own making.