Tending to the Body

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When Rebecca Dopart’s father-in-law passed away shortly after her wedding, she was awed by how her husband, Janusz, took care of his father's body. 

“I was so overwhelmed by the emotion of the whole thing,” Dopart says. “And yet there was something amazing and beautiful and sweet, that this brand new husband I had was shaving his father.”

When she asked him why he wouldn't simply let a nurse attend to the body, he replied, “Why would I? It’s my father.”

“I really have come to just think that Polish people have a very emotionally mature way of seeing death as a part of life,” Dopart says. “I almost feel like they approached it in a way that sort of said ‘everything in life is hard, death is just a part of it.’”