Life after death abroad
Death can be unexpected and indiscriminate, striking when a person is at their best, their happiest or their most adventurous.
Making funeral arrangements isn’t normally on a traveller’s pre-travel to do list, nor should it be. Yet hundreds of Canadians are met with fatal accidents, illnesses and crimes each year in countries far from home.
A study conducted by the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada found that there were 2.8 million Canadians — or approximately 9 per cent of Canada’s population — living abroad as of 2006. And 4,740 died while abroad between 2005 and 2009, with most years resulting in a higher number of deaths than the previous one.
This month, family, friends and colleagues of backpacker Abbey Amisola are mourning the Winnipeg woman’s death in Cambodia on Nov. 14. Amisola, 27, and a 22-year-old English woman named Natalie Jade Seymour died in a Cambodian hostel after they fell sick and took medicine from a local pharmacy.
Local police are investigating the deaths. Meanwhile, a crowdfunding campaign set up to help Amisola’s family bring her remains back to Canada has raised $31,800 since Nov. 14.
Legal processes and customs around death can vary widely from one culture to another, but Global Affairs Canada recommends a process next of kin should follow any time a relative dies abroad. Many of these are typical steps to take when a person dies, but the added element of distance and an unfamiliar country’s policies can make the job especially painful.
Toronto-based immigration lawyer Joel Sandaluk has had personal experience with the process.
“You’ve got to navigate a bureaucracy that is in some places very difficult, in some countries…very foreign and unfamiliar.” Sandaluk said. “That would add a level of stress to the situation that would be almost unbearable.”
The process starts with notifying the deceased person’s travel insurance provider. Some policies in Canada can cover up to $5,000 of the cost to fly a person’s remains home, while more comprehensive policies can provide up to $50,000 in the case of death or dismemberment.
The cost to repatriate human remains from Thailand to the U.S., can reach between $4,800 and $5,200, while the cost to repatriate remains from France to the east coast of the U.S. can reach $9,000. Information about the cost to repatriate a body from Thailand and France to Canada isn’t as readily available.
The next step is to find a funeral home with experience in international funeral arrangements in the region where the death took place.
While the funeral home helps make funeral arrangements, in both countries, if necessary, next of kin should cancel the deceased person’s benefits and social insurance number and return their passport to Canada’s passport program.
The family’s representative will need to get a death certificate issued by the country where the death occurred, and some countries require an autopsy before a certificate is issued. Then there’s the matter of preparing the body, either for burial or for cremation.
If local laws prevent cremation in the country where the death occurred, a mortuary passport might be necessary to transport the remains to a nearby country for cremation. If cremation is out of the question, a body must be embalmed and sealed in an air-tight, metal lined casket before it can be flown home.
In some countries, specialized funeral homes will take care of preparing a deceased person’s remains for repatriation and shipping them home. While it’s an expensive option, leaving a professional to navigate local laws and secure the proper documentation can be worth the cost.
“I think there’s a massive amount of government bureaucracy that’s involved in moving even the most innocuous product between borders,” said Sandaluk, adding that the hurdles people face when trying to fly deceased relatives home can be especially difficult to cope with.
If a death abroad is considered suspicious, the process becomes even more complicated. Mexican law, for example, doesn’t permit cremation of a person who died due to criminal action or suspicious circumstances, or who is part of an official investigation.
And crimes committed in other countries are usually within the jurisdiction of local law enforcement, so the influence of Canadian law enforcement is often limited.
“In a lot of cases, the RCMP will cooperate with foreign law enforcement agencies by doing things like, for example, interviewing people,” Sandaluk said. “But generally speaking it’ll be the foreign law enforcement agencies responsible.”
This can be unsettling for the families of victims of crime abroad. So much so, that the Canadian Resource Centre for Victims of Crime has lobbied the Global Affairs ministry to create an International Victim Assistance Office, and former Liberal MP Dan McTeague has criticized Global Affairs for not doing enough to solve the murders of Canadians abroad.
Sandaluk said it’s common for families of murder victims who have died abroad to take investigations into their own hands. He gave the example of a suspicious death in Mexico.
“What’s happened is the families of the deceased haven’t trusted Mexican authorities’ investigation,” he said. “So they’ve hired private investigators to go to Mexico and interview witnesses and try to reach their own conclusion about what happened in order to build a case on their own.”
While families sometimes have to use their own resources to find answers after the death of a loved one abroad, they don’t need to navigate legal and procedural steps of bringing a person home on their own. The Emergency Watch and Response Centre exists to help manage crises that happen abroad, including death.
For help coping with the emotional fallout of sudden and unexpected death, grief counselling services and programs offer care on both a short and long term basis.
