Charleen Shakman sitting in his outdoor car st.Louis on Friday afternoon, constantly updating his prestigious flight app until he saw that the plane had landed.
It had been days since his father, Charles Pyles, had died of COVID-19 in the Philippines.Now, I was hoping, your father would come home on that flight.
But the veteran of the Iraq war was still concerned that a last-minute challenge with customs or some other technical problem would obstruct her painful reunion.
To get to this point, she had become entangled with a Filipino funeral home, encountered a bureaucratic wall with the U.S. Embassy in Manila, and was desperate to see her beloved father’s cremated ashes on a shelf more than 13,000 kilometers away.
Getting this far required all the weight of a U.S. senator’s office, as well as media attention and other pressures, went to the shipping collection area, filled out some papers and took her father back into his arms.
“He’s here!” said Shakman in an email On Friday night.”He’s still with us.”
She took him back to his car, where he called his mother, Doris Pyles, to break the news to him.”He couldn’t even though it all happened,” Shakman said in a phone interview with USA TODAY, who first wrote about Shakman’s fate on August 27.
Shakman he he own beaten by sadness and euphoria.
“I don’t even know how to feel. It’s just combined emotions,” he said.”I’m still dealing with pain, but I’m glad you’re here.”
Above all, he says, he feels gratitude for all those who have helped achieve it.
After USA TODAY wrote about his situation, Senator Josh Hawley, Republican for Missouri, “moved from the mountains” to bring his father to the United States.
Hawley lobbied senior State Department officials on his behalf, mobilized United Airlines lobbyists to establish flights, and even contacted the White House for assistance on customs issues and border coverage.
“We were revered for playing a role in helping reunite Mr. Pyles with his family,” said Kyle Plotkin, Hawley’s staff leader.”There were a lot of moving parts.”
Shakman first learned on May 12 that his father had passed away and received a brutal message that said, “Your father is dead.Too sick.”
Pyles, a long-time resident of Kentucky, in the Philippines when he became ill with COVID-19 and succumbed to the virus.His wife Doris had stayed in Kentucky, where they lived and where Shakman grew up.
When the pandemic began, Shakman asked his father to return to the United States, but had a common 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.friends in the expat community.
The State Department helped bring home thousands of American travelers who found thee stranded 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 US citizens die each year for a variety of reasons, from motor vehicle injuries to drownings to homicides, according to a database from the firm.
Normally, when Americans die abroad, embassy officials can do so with a variety of responsibilities, from notifying relatives to repatriating the remains.
But in this case, Shakman encountered one impediment after another: the pandemic had reduced U.S. embassy facilities and slowed down around the world.The funeral home appeared not to be planted, as did U.S. officials.
Once Hawley intervened, said Shakman, a representative of the U.S. embassy in Manila called her, and her stage gained the high-level attention of the State Department.Even her boss, Johnston Controls CEO George Oliver, called her to ask him how he could do it.the company’s government affairs team on hold.
“So many other people (helped) do this for us,” he said.It’ll take weeks, he said, to thank you all.
Meanwhile, she will travel to Kentucky this weekend to put her father to rest, who said he searched for his ashes scattered on his parents’ grave, so she will meet with a small organization of the circle of relatives to meet the latter. wish. .
Also: ”Help me bring my father home”: months after the death of a guy with COVID-19 abroad, his circle of relatives cannot recover his remains