It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strangeamps. Today, The Wake, part four of our series on death.

After someone you love has died, the first of so many difficult tasks you face is deciding how to deal with what they've left behind, their body.

We're a little squeamish about dead bodies in this country, but there's nothing like is deciding how to deal with what they've left behind, their body.

We're a little squeamish about dead bodies in this country,

but there's nothing like encountering another culture's traditions

to shock you out of your own.

In the mid-90s, Rebecca Dupart was working as a Peace Corps volunteer

in a tiny village in Poland.

She fell in love and got married there,

and then, three weeks after the wedding,

her husband Janish's father died.

The hospital was really just stones throw away from where Janush lived. So we walked into this room

where there were six to eight beds lined up against the windows.

There were living patients in the other beds, and in the middle was my father-in-law and he was dead.

And I sat against the wall in a chair and watched my very new husband.

Only a few weeks we'd been married. And he pulled up a chair

next to his father and pulled out a straight-edge razor and just started to shave him. And the people

who were next to him and the other beds were drinking tea and reading the paper.

No one was faced by it. It was all normal. I was so overwhelmed by

emotion of the whole thing and I felt sick to my stomach. I felt like I was going to faint from

the whole hospitalness of it and the idea

that that was a dead body and yet there was something amazing and beautiful and sweet

...