Beatles fan’s lost letter turns to story of pandemic hope

RIO DE JANEIRO: Like so many victims of Covid-19, Brazilian Karlo Schneider never got to say goodbye to his family. Unlike most, he managed to get them a message a year after he died.

Schneider’s family, who describe him as a die-hard romantic with an infectious love of life, kissed him farewell when the Brazilian hotel manager left for work one morning in February 2021, and never held him again.

Schneider came down with coronavirus symptoms that day, and stayed at the hotel to avoid infecting his family. Their only contact after that was in calls from his sick bed and one socially distanced look – the badly ill father in his car on his way to the hospital, his wife and three kids waving from the house.

But Schneider, who died at 40 that March, delivered his loved ones a letter a year later, with a little help from his friends, the Beatles and a viral video.

The story starts at a dinner party in 2006, when Schneider, then expecting his first child, got the idea for he and his friends to write letters to his unborn daughter to open on her 15th birthday.

A passionate Beatles fan with hundreds of rare records, he stashed the letters inside his most precious possession: his vinyl collection.

“He loved that kind of thing,” says his wife, Alcione, who was six months pregnant at the time.

“He was always asking things like, ‘If you could leave a message in a bottle for someone in the future, what would you say?’”

He was the kind of dad who created elaborate treasure hunts for his kids, the kind of friend who showed up at dawn on your birthday to surprise you with a present, she says.

Such escapades were so common at the Schneiders’ home in the northeastern city of Natal that they soon forgot all about the letters, she says.

Fast forward 14 years, and the pandemic was wreaking worldwide havoc. Like many, Schneider lost his job. Struggling financially, he decided to sell most of his record collection.

Things looked to be getting better in early 2021, when he got a job at another hotel in Mossoro, 280 kilometres away. But he soon caught Covid-19. It happened very fast, says Alcione, 41. The moving truck arrived in Mossoro with their things on Feb 12. A week later, Schneider got sick. On March 2, he was intubated. By March 11, he was gone.