CNN) -- George Harrington applied for the Federal Emergency Management Agency's funeral assistance program soon after it launched in mid-April. He sent in all the documents related to the burial of his father, George III, 80, a veteran and registered nurse who had died from Covid-19 in a nursing home a year earlier.
And then he waited. And waited. And waited.
Harrington, who paid more than $11,000 for his father's funeral, called FEMA every week but the staffers couldn't tell him when he might receive the funds. The Danvers, Massachusetts, resident reached out to elected officials too as he grew increasingly frustrated.
Finally, in June, he received the reimbursement of $9,000, the maximum FEMA provides for each loved one who died of Covid-19. He's now more understanding of the time it took to process his application.
"It let me pay off bills, let me get back on my feet," said Harrington, a community manager for an affordable housing division of a real estate developer. "I got my money. I didn't have to wait a year. So I'm happy."
Harrington is among the more than 135,000 people who've been helped so far by the funeral assistance program, which Congress established as part of its coronavirus relief legislation. The effort got off to a rocky start, but the agency has approved about 55% of the nearly 247,500 applications it's received and has doled out more than $888 million, as of August 2.
Minnesota residents have had the highest percentage of their applications approved, at 64%, followed by Oklahoma residents at 63%. Applicants in Alaska, the District of Columbia and Montana each had among the lowest shares, with about 44% of their claims approved, along with Puerto Rico at 43%.
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