Day after day, Susan Shirley sits at the round, wooden table in her Arvada kitchen, her blue eyes intensely scanning e-mails or Facebook messages on her laptop and then, eventually, wandering past the window into the yard where her son once played.

She refocuses on the spiral notebook before her and logs another entry in a minute-by-minute to-do list of grief: 10:30: …request info costs embalming etc….

The notes go on for pages, chronicling a mother’s complex quest to bring home her son, 24-year-old Levi Jonathan “Jack” Shirley, who was killed on a Syrian battlefield while fighting the Islamic State.

Frustrated that his eyesight rendered him unfit for the U.S. Marines, Jack joined the war on terror, against the wishes of his government, by volunteering with the People’s Protection Unit, a Kurdish group clashing with the Islamic State in northern Syria. Amid the tangled geopolitical alliances of the Middle East, the YPG — shorthand for Jack’s unit — falls under a political wing believed to have ties to yet another group the U.S. has classified as a terrorist organization.

And so news of his death, the second among an estimated 100 Americans who have volunteered with such militias, arrived not with a hero’s accolades and the thanks of a grateful nation, but with a logistical burden heaped upon sorrow at the loss of a son.

Gold Star denotes the families of fallen U.S. soldiers. Red tape defines one family’s painful effort to reclaim the body of a soldier who fought a common enemy under a foreign flag.

The Shirleys view their sorrow through the prism of pride in what they consider Jack’s noble intentions, and in a sacrifice no less final than any other. But circumstances have demanded a singular focus on negotiating an international bureaucratic maze — a numbing task that has forestalled the grieving process.

“There’s only so much terror you can take in one sitting,” Susan says. “And it’s like that with grief, too.”

In the back of her mind looms the stark possibility that if she doesn’t succeed, then her son could be buried in some unmarked grave in Syria. “What am I supposed to do — bury a piece of paper with the latitude and longitude written on it?” she asks.

She presses on — more Facebook messages with families who have lost their sons, or people whose humanitarian aid work has made them familiar with the area where Jack died. They advise her not to take the State Department’s recommendation of having her son transported through Turkey. Too dangerous, they say. Jack’s association with the Kurds, at odds with Turkish authorities, could further complicate transport of the body.

It has gone on like this nearly every day since July 19, when Susan answered the first phone call from the U.S. Consulate in Turkey. The man asked about her son’s tattoos, the color of his eyes, the color of his hair.

When he asked if she knew where he was, she panicked. Jack had left for Texas in January to train as an emergency medical services provider — at least, that was what he had told her. The man from the consulate took her information and seemed to be withholding something from her.

But Susan would not hang up the phone. She pressed him for details, until he finally, reluctantly revealed that her son had died five days earlier. More details followed in a letter attached to an e-mail from the YPG, which explained that Jack had been marching toward Islamic State strongholds with other Kurdish fighters when he stepped on a landmine in the city of Manbij.

The YPG commander offered condolences to the Shirley family in a sometimes awkwardly worded letter: “While he has reached a vast amount of achievement up in our front lines, (Jack) has served the purpose of a very important bridge between us, the Kurds of Rojava. He crossed continents for the destiny of our people and humanity.”

Jack Shirley’s relatives had their suspicions about his supposed move to Texas for EMS training.

He already had served one tour in Syria almost a year earlier. And he wrote about his intent to return on a Facebook page he created under the nom de guerre Agir Servan in November, noting that he would be back “soon enough. Not in 2015 but in 2016.”

His family had no knowledge of that Facebook account. But they had known of his desire to serve in the military for years.

While a student at Arvada High School, Jack trained with the local Marine recruiting office. He tutored other students to help them pass the Marine entry exam, and could be spotted marching around Olde Town. Only his eyesight held him back.

The Military Entrance Processing Station disqualified Jack in October 2010 for poor vision. He eventually had Lasik surgery in February 2012, but couldn’t reapply until after a mandatory post-operative waiting period. But Jack never enlisted.

Still, he grew increasingly consumed by moral outrage and disgust with the Islamic State and its atrocities over the next few years. Susan speculates that he discovered the Facebook page for the Lions of Rojava, a recruitment tool of the YPG, while he was reading about the conflict in Syria.

And that, she suspects, fueled his interest in joining the fight — although even after he bought his plane ticket, Jack volunteered little by way of explanation. Susan wouldn’t let him off the hook that easily. She sat him down at the old table in the kitchen and asked him question after question, until finally, he offered his rationale.

He acknowledged the dangers: the lethal perils of combat combined with the perhaps even more harrowing risk of capture by Islamic State terrorists whose brutality has been well-documented. He would have to pay his own way overseas and receive nothing for his service.

But he couldn’t let the horrors in the region continue. He echoed the belief of many other volunteers that evil prevails when good men sit back and do nothing.

Although Jack admired and sought to emulate his family’s history of military service, his father had discouraged the idea. Russell Shirley, who served two tours in Vietnam and has struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder and readjusting to civilian life, felt relief when Jack was disqualified from the Marines. He figured that put an end to the possibility of his son joining a foreign battle.

So when Jack first volunteered with the YPG, his father was shocked. Even for a veteran who had witnessed carnage in southeast Asia, the war against the Islamic State represented something he said he “wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole.” But Jack was not deterred.

In June 2015, when he returned from his first tour, he said he had had enough fighting for two lifetimes. Again, his father felt relieved and assumed that his son’s thirst for combat had been quenched.

They went out to dinner and shared stories from the frontlines. Jack showed his dad the dark angelic figure with the phrase “ISIS Killer” above it permanently inked on his biceps. He had a military-green T-shirt with the same inscription.

Russell took photos of Jack that night that remain stored on his camera, along with images of a restaurant owned by a friend who has offered to display Jack’s treasured Chicago Bears helmet, signed by legendary linebacker Dick Butkus, as well as his favorite Bears jersey and photos from his time in Syria.

But largely, Jack kept his plans for a return to the Middle East conflict to himself.

“He saved us a lot of worrying,” figures his 23-year-old sister, Kate. “I wish he would’ve said something, but I know that I would have been worried out of my mind every single day.”

The two of them had corresponded through Facebook messages, with Jack using his real-name account, soon after he claimed to have left for Texas. But when the frequency of those messages trailed off, Kate recalls being more annoyed than concerned: Is EMT school really that busy that you can’t send me a Facebook message?

The siblings had fought constantly while growing up in the same house, but maturity eventually turned the dynamic in a more positive direction. Kate calculated that they would have the rest of their lives to build a friendship and make up for lost time.

“I know he knows that I’m proud of him,” she says. “You know, he was a really good big brother.”

Jamie Lane and Jayson Pihajlic, both former Marines, understand the pull of the conflict that has lured other young people to Syria. After they returned from their U.S. military tours, they realized that the cities they had promised to protect and the people they had tried to save now found themselves under attack by the Islamic State.

Like Jack, they wanted to go back and make a difference.

Pihajlic, currently in the U.S. after spending 40 days in an Iraqi Kurdish prison for an expired visa and illegally crossing into Syria, spent nearly a year in the Middle East — first with the Kurdish soldiers known as Peshmerga, who wouldn’t let him fight on the front lines, and then the YPG.

Lane, who started with the YPG, experienced a similar problem. He and other Western volunteers were kept off the front lines until they threatened to leave. He now speculates that they were steered away from the heaviest combat so they would not “see how bad the casualty rate was and how bad the fighting actually was.”

Finally, he was able to see what the Kurdish militia was up against. When he ran into Jack after his return from a week-long battle in a nearby city, Lane offered some advice: “All I could tell him was to leave, leave here, because to me, after that fight, it appeared suicidal to me to be fighting there.”

Pihajlic describes the fighting going on in Manbij as a “meat grinder.” Just days ago, two more Westerners died in the city.

Despite the dire circumstances, Jack brought a positive — even humorous — vibe to the conflict, Pihajlic says. He would rattle off jokes from the minute they all woke up. And once, on Pihajlic’s 30th birthday, Jack covered all of his shifts.

“He was just a really good guy and always looking out for everyone else,” Pihajlic says. “He was the kind of guy that just made everybody laugh.”

He remembers Jack delivering a stand-up routine of rapid-fire comedic movie lines surrounded by the shell of a church bombed to near destruction by the Islamic State. To Pihajlic, Jack seemed a natural-born comedian.

His assessment wasn’t far off. Even in high school, the gangly, 6-foot-5 teen embraced passions for football — he dreamed of starring for the Bears — as well as the Marines, but his joy for making people laugh overlapped it all.

Matt Teegarden, a counselor at Arvada High School who remembers him fondly, was shocked by his death.

“Jack was committed to service and justice,” he says. “He found a way to stand up for what he believed and he gave his life for that. My personal opinion — a good, noble cause. Any loss hurts us, any loss of human life hurts us. But this one’ll leave a mark, you know?”

Russell Shirley knows.

“He’s my hero,” Russell says of his son. “I’m gonna miss him so much.”

Susan Shirley sits at the same kitchen table where Jack once explained why he needed to go to war, now struggling to repatriate his remains. Sometimes, she flashes back to when he was a toddler.

He was perhaps 3, but already displaying a soft heart and an empathy beyond his years. Susan, suffering from a terrible headache, told him she was going to lie down for a minute because she didn’t feel good.

“And so, he goes in the bathroom,” she says, “gets a washcloth and runs cold water over it and probably wrung it out, brings it to me, puts it on my forehead and pats my hand and says, ‘Get better, Mommy.’ ”

Get better. First, she must bring him home.

Jack’s body lies in a hospital in the city of Al-Malikiyah, which is a Kurdish-held safe haven in Syria about 250 miles from the fighting in Manbij. The State Department, which declined an interview request by The Denver Post, has been working on necessary documents to ensure transport of his body — a process Susan has been warned could take weeks.

For now, Susan has decided to trust the YPG to move her son’s remains from Syria into Iraq. There, Jack’s body could be embalmed and then transferred to either Amman, Jordan, which has a direct flight to Chicago, or to Qatar, which has a direct flight to New York.

Susan says a U.S. official estimated that costs of bringing Jack home could run as high as $7,000, although the YPG has vowed to defray as much of the cost as it can. Meanwhile, Jack’s sister has launched a GoFundMe page that has raised more than $10,000 so far. After taking care of the funeral and related costs, the family has said it will donate any remaining money to the YPG.

But these plans are tentative. Transport of the body is complicated by geopolitical issues, the lack of relationship between the U.S. and Syria, and the State Department’s Syria Travel Warning that strongly discourages U.S. citizens from joining the conflict and cautions that consular help in the event of kidnapping or death is “extremely limited.”

Susan Shirley has come to understand the complexity of the situation, but federal bureaucratic gridlock has heaped frustration atop grief. While heartbroken at the loss of her son, she takes some comfort in the belief that he died trying to make the world a better place.

“If something positive can result from all this terrible stuff …,” she says, her voice trailing off while she gathers her thoughts about the global threat posed by the Islamic State. “It’s not a Middle Eastern problem, not a Kurdish problem. It’s everyone’s problem.

“This is a clear example of evil vs. good, as divided as anything could be.”