Widow reveals war
hero’s spirit messages
The story of Staff Sergeant Olaf (Oz) Schmid was remarkable enough. An improvised explosive device brought the life of this top bomb disposal expert to an abrupt end, at the age of 30, on the last day of a five-and-a-half-month deployment to Afghanistan, in October 2009. He was awarded a posthumous George Medal
for his heroism, which The Queen presented to his widow, Christina, at Buckingham
Palace in 2010.
Now Christina (pictured left) has written a book about their life together which reveals a new dimension to the story: spirit messages from Oz have convinced her that he is still very much with her.
Always By My Side, which has been serialised in the
Daily Mail, also reveals that both she and Oz had premonitions that he wouldn’t be coming home from Afghanistan. Her own foreboding coincided precisely with the time of his death.
Christina is described by the newspaper as “the war widow whose dignity touched Britain”. She has since become a campaigner and ambassador for Afghanistan’s dead and injured soldiers and their families.
The Daily Mail headline on the extract dealing with Oz’s spirit communications left readers in no doubt about their impact: “Oz still keeps me going – by sending messages through a medium”.
This contact with her dead husband began in January 2010 when the mother of a friend of Laird, Oz’s six-year-old stepson, stopped Christina at the school gates. She said her mother wanted to get in touch with Christina as she had a message from Oz. Hesitant at first, Christina eventually called the woman, who is clearly a local medium but is not identified in the serialised story.
Staff Sergeant Olaf (Oz) Schmid and (inset) a George Medal,
which he was posthumously awarded for his heroism.
“How soon can you come?” she asked, adding, “I never normally tell people to come this soon after a bereavement but he keeps saying, ‘Will you speak to her? Where is she? I’m here, I want to talk to her.’ He’s been to see two other people in the same church as me. He’s very persistent.”
Christina hesitantly accepted the invitation and was offered coffee on her arrival. The medium then said, “He’s saying, ‘coffee, white, one’. ‘Man up.’ Oh, and what an awful taste – it’s something like liquorice. What’s that?”
His widow explains: “His liquorice rollies with menthol tips – he always smoked them. And that’s how he talked, he always said ‘coffee, white, one’ and ‘man up’ – they were his phrases.”
The spirit messages from Oz continued with an assurance that he would always be around. “He says always forever, you two. Always for ever, my love, even through death. You’ll always be married to me.”
Christina reveals in her book that this had always been very important to her husband, who had told her: “There’s only one, always forever, you and me. If anything happens to me I want you to be happy, live with someone, have kids but don’t marry him. You’re my wife, you’ll always be married to me.”
Christina says she felt she had been thrown a lifeline. Her account ends with these words:
“The woman went on passing me messages – things that only Oz and I knew, beautiful things that he’d said to me. At one point she and I were both in tears....
“Two years on from his death I still miss Oz every single day. I’ve been back to see the Spiritualist a handful of times, in periods when everything feels bleak and hopeless. She always passes on an Oz message, phrased in his distinctive style. And it helps me to keep going.”
