WASHINGTON – “Your father is dead. Too sick.
This brutal, misspelled message is what Charleen Shakman awoke on May 12. His father, Charles Pyles, 77, a longtime Kentucky resident, in the Philippines when he became ill with COVID-19 and succumbed to the virus.
She knew nothing, those seven words would be the beginning of a nightmare of months that would charge her thousands of dollars, countless tears and hours of frustrated calls and emails to the U.S. Embassy and the assistance of members of Congress with a likely undeniable task. . : bring your father’s remains to the United States.
Nothing is undeniable in a pandemic that has sickened millions of people, slowed worldwide and reduced the services of the U.S. Embassy.
“I’m desperate and I’m sorry,” Shakman said in an interview Monday, crying as she spoke of satisfying her father’s last wishes.
The State Department helped bring home thousands of American travelers who found the bout in the middle of the closure when the pandemic began.
The firm does not keep statistics on the number of Americans who have died from COVID-19 abroad. Hundreds of U.S. citizens die each year for a variety of reasons, from car injuries to drownings and homicides, according to a firm database.
Normally, when Americans die abroad, embassy officials can do so with a variety of responsibilities, from notifying family members to repatriating the remains.
Shakman said that didn’t happen in his father’s case. Shakman leads the family’s efforts to bring Pyles’ remains home, with the help of her mother, Doris Pyles, who lives in Kentucky and did not do so with her husband.
After the initial shock of her husband’s death, Doris said she and her daughter thought about their next steps. “We’ll send money and we’ll talk to the embassy, and everything will be OK,” she thought. “Well, nothing was OK. Absolutely nothing.”
They said they felt ripped off through the Philippine funeral home that took $4,000 of the family’s cash, rates that included “repatriation of urns/ashes to Kentucky USA,” under the contract she shared with USA TODAY. And they feel abandoned by the State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Manila, to which Shakman pleaded.
“PLEASE MAKE MY PAPA TO THE !!!!” Shakman wrote in an email. ”Lately he’s sitting in a jar on the shelf of a funeral home I’ve seen or visited.’
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The U.S. Embassy in Manila asks the State Department in Washington.
An official from the State Decomposer did not deal with Shakman’s express case. Speaking of anonymity as a component of the agency’s policy, the official said that due to the pandemic, “embassies may face delays due to local conditions, the availability of foreign officials and logistical demands similar to COVID-19.”
In the case of the Pyles family, it lasted 106 days, and that matters.
“I need your ashes. I need him back here in the United States. And I know that’s what he needs,” Doris Pyles, 75, said in a phone interview Wednesday. “I didn’t need to stay in the Philippines in a box somewhere on a shelf.”
When the pandemic began, Shakman asked his father to return to the United States. He had an ordinary traveler after retiring from his post as an official at Fort Knox. He enjoyed the Philippines, making his home away from home with a circle of friends in the expat community.
In early May, some of his friends feared not seeing Pyles outside. They went to his apartment and discovered he was seriously ill. Doris Pyles said her husband refused to go to hospital and died shortly after the visit.
Grieving, the circle of relatives began to make the obligatory arrangements.
“He made it very transparent to all who enjoyed that what he was looking for was to be cremated in the Philippines, that his ashes were sent to my mother’s house, and that we should gather at his parents’ grave” to scatter his ashes,” Shakman said. an American army veteran who works for Johnson Controls in Missouri.
Until that happens, he said, “we’re all in limbo and unstable.”
It’s unclear what the heist is. A representative of the funeral home in the Philippines reported by email that he had not gone to locate an airline that would bring Pyles’ remains. The funeral home shared copies of text messages and emails with Shakman, in which she denies letting down the circle of relatives and says she works with “heart and sincerity” to help make her father.
“Not all airlines settle for freight, not just freight, a RESTE CREATED by HUMAIN,” is read in part from a message.
When Shakman asked the embassy for help, he said, “Here’s the bureaucracy you want Array … good luck,” he said.
Shakman contacted his U.S. senators in Missouri, where he lives, and his mother wrote a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican for Ky. Shakman said lawmakers sent her and her mother answers in the form of sending her to the embassy.
After USA TODAY asked the offices of McConnell and Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, at either office he contacted Shakman and pledged to help him.
On Wednesday, Shakman won a text message from one of his father’s most productive friends in the Philippines, who spent months searching for him. He told her that he had received an appointment with the U.S. Embassy for the signing of his father’s death certificate. And he had discovered a flight that would take his father’s urn next week, unless it was cancelled.
Doris Pyles said she was in a position to collect her husband’s ashes at any time.
“All they have to do is call and say there’s a package for Doris Pyles,” he said. “I’m just him at home.”
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