WASHINGTON – “Your father is dead. Too sick.
This brutal and misspelled message is what Charleen Shakman woke up with on May 12. His 77-year-old father, Charles Pyles, a Kentucky veteran, in the Philippines when he became ill with COVID-19 and succumbed to the virus.
She didn’t know it, the seven words would be the beginning of a month nightmare that will 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 probably undeniable. task: bring his father’s remains to the United States.
But nothing is undeniable in a global pandemic that has sickened millions of people, slowed globally and reduced the facilities of U.S. embassies.
“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. But many 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 assume a variety of responsibilities, from notifying family members to repatriating the remains.
But Shakman said that’s not what happened to his father. Shakman led the family’s efforts to bring Pyles’ remains home, her mother, Doris Pyles, who lives in Kentucky and did not travel with her husband, also helped.
After the initial surprise of her husband’s death, Doris Pyles said she and her daughter had an idea about their next steps. “We’ll send cash and communicate with the embassy and everything will be fine,” he says. “Well, not good. Absolutely nothing.”
They feel ripped off through the Philippine funeral home that took $4,000 from their family, rates that included “repatriation of urns/ashes to Kentucky USA,” according to the contract he shared with USA TODAY. And they feel abandoned through the State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Manila, whom she asked for help.
“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.’
Coronavirus-related nightmare: a blur of cancelled flights, border closures and martial law
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. But the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity as a component of the agency’s policy, said that due to the pandemic, “embassies may face delays due to local conditions, the availability of foreign government officials and logistical demands related to COVID.” 19. “
In the case of the Pyles family, it has now 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 first appeared, Shakman asked his father to return to the United States. But 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 the local hospital and died shortly after the visit.
Overwhelmed by pain, the circle of relatives began to make the obligatory arrangements.
“He made it very transparent to everyone who enjoyed that what he was looking for was to be cremated in the Philippines, that his ashes be sent to my mother, and that we gathered in his parents’ grave” to scatter his ashes,” said Shakman, a U.S. Army Veteran who now 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 Philippine funeral home reported by email that they had not been to locate an airline that would bring Pyles’ human remains. The funeral home shared copies of text messages and emails with Shakman, denying they have let down the circle of relatives and say they are running with “heart and sincerity” to help make their 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.
Then Shakman contacted his U.S. senators in Missouri, where he now lives, and his mother wrote a letter to Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, 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 Senator Josh Hawley of McConnell and the Missouri Republican Party, at either office they contacted her and promised to help her.
And on Wednesday, Shakman won a text message from one of his father’s most productive friends in the Philippines, who also spent months searching for them. 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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