The burning Tower card, seen as the harbinger of doom, repeatedly cropped up.
It was one of a host of spooky premonitions she had both before and during hubby Oz’s fatal five-month mission to the Afghanistan front line, where he defused 70 Taliban bombs.
Today Christina tells of the dreadful day he begged her to read his future — and the moment she saw his destruction in the cards.
In her own words, taken from her memoir about Staff Sergeant Olaf “Oz” Schmid, Always By My Side, she writes: “Oz asked me to do his Tarot cards.
“The Tarot was something I did very rarely, perhaps once every other year. I wasn’t sure about doing it this time, but Oz urged me to and I agreed.
“I had done them since I was young and I seemed to be gifted. The card he chose to show the future was the Burning Tower. I did them again, this time for career, Oz chose the Burning Tower again. The worst card there is.
“It signifies death and endings, the worst outcome imaginable and entirely unavoidable. Everything you know gone in ruin or catastrophe.
Afghanistan ... Oz was kil
led the day before he was due to fly homePAUL EDWARDS
Oz looked stricken. He said, ‘I feel this is going to be a really bad year for me. I’ve got this feeling as if everything is slipping’.
“I tried to lighten it, saying, ‘You’ll probably just stub your toe when you’re at work — you’re always a screamer with loads of bad luck! Don’t worry, it might just mean that you won’t get a promotion or something’.
“‘No’, he said. ‘It’s not the card. That just confirmed what I already know and feel’.
“When it was my turn to choose a card I hoped I might get something that would lift the mood, but I was startled when I got it in my spread of cards, too.
Memories ... Olaf and Christina on a break at the seaside
“But then I got rebirth after, and the moon. ‘See, hun — always light in the dark. Remember that’, he said. I tried to hide my dismay. ‘It’s a dark time of year. Perhaps we’re both just feeling it’, I said.
“ ‘Let’s be positive, forget the cards, we’ve got lots to look forward to’, I chirped, waiting for him to follow my lead.
“He usually did, but this time Oz said, ‘No, it’s bad. I’ve got this feeling that if I go out after January or February, I’m not coming back. That’s what my gut is telling me’. There was nothing I could say that would cheer him and the truth was it was hard even to try, because I felt worried too.”
Despite the omen, devoted Christina put aside her foreboding when Oz was sent to the front.
During his dangerous deployment she would make a wish for his protection during the full moon.
But on the last full moon before Oz’s return she inexplicably fell asleep with young son Laird and missed her routine.
She writes: “I woke around 4am, disorientated. I was fully clothed and Laird was asleep on me, in his pyjamas. As the realisation dawned that I had missed doing the wish for Oz, the moon had disappeared and I felt distraught.
Happy family ... Olaf and Christina with son Laird and their dog
“ ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’ I whispered. ‘I’ve done it every month. Why now?’
“I told myself it didn’t matter, that it was just a bit of silly tradition, that I should forget it. But I couldn’t.”
Christina’s foreboding grew to fever pitch shortly before Oz, who won a gallantry gong on his tour, was due home.
The spooky signs grew to the point where she says she KNEW he was dead even before the fateful news came with a knock on the door from two officers bringing confirmation.
She writes: “Two days before he was due to leave Afghanistan for home, Oz called again. I could hear immediately that he was low.
“He had been out of contact for several days and he sounded shattered. He said, ‘Honey, I just feel really bad, I’ve got this odd feeling, like dread, I don’t feel safe, it’s bad. Have you got it too?’ I had. In the pit of my stomach I felt a lurch as he spoke.
The Burning Tower ... signifies deathBen Molyneux / Alamy
“I had been uneasy, anxious, and had a feeling of dread, but I didn’t want to say that.
‘You’re tired,’ I said. ‘It’s OK, you’ll be back soon. Do what you did the last few months in the next couple of days, hun. You’ve got 48 hours left, that’s all’.
“ ‘Honey’, he said, ‘I’m mentally and spiritually hammered, I’m hanging out. I’ve been away too long, worked too much.
“ ‘And if it’s too much for me it’s too much for anyone. But I can’t let it show. I’ve got to keep positive and strong, they (the other men) have to trust me. If anything happens to me, I don’t want them to blame themselves.
“ ‘I wish you could come and get me. I need you. Just come and get me now, honey’.
“ ‘I wish I could’, I said, tears running down my face. ‘But I can’t. You’ve got to stop talking like this, you’re just tired. You can push for 48 hours’. ‘I need to speak to Laird,’ he said. I handed Laird the phone and he went upstairs and they talked.
“When Laird gave the phone back, Oz said, ‘I’m calm, honey, but I can’t help how I feel. I don’t think I’m coming back, ’cos I’m cuffing it now. I’m drained — it’s hard to explain’.
“The next day I kept the phone beside me all evening, hoping he’d ring. I wanted to ring him but I couldn’t, so that night I emailed — ‘Please email me, Don’t go out on the ground tomorrow, cut the last day, don’t do it.’ He never got it.”
That night Christina had a visitation in her dreams from another hero bomb hunter, Warrant Officer Gary “Gaz” O’Donnell, who had perished in the Afghan badlands disarming a Taliban device.
She writes: “I slept fitfully then I dreamed that Gaz O’Donnell was standing in front of me. ‘Don’t worry, Chris, I’m here to get him when he comes over,’ he said. ‘I’ll hold him. I won’t let go’.
Interview ... Sun's David Willetts and Christina SchmidPaul Edwards/ The Sun
“ ‘What are you on about?’ I said. ‘You’ve got no arms’. Gaz just looked at me and smiled.
“The next morning, Saturday October 31, 2009, I woke at 6.30am with a feeling I’d never had before. It was as powerful as thunder.
“ ‘It’s today’, I thought. ‘He’s going or has he gone yet?’ I felt it so surely that it was in the floor beneath my feet as I got out of bed and in the air around me as I went downstairs.
“I felt numb, suspended in time, as I went through the motions of life. At nine I phoned my mum and told her I wasn’t going to take Laird to his swimming lesson that morning. ‘What’s going on?’ she said. ‘You sound so quiet. Oz is home tomorrow, you should be happy’.
“I paused. ‘He’s not coming home, Mum, I know it’. ”
Oz was killed, defusing a bomb, on Halloween while Christina was walking in the woods gathering her thoughts.
At the exact moment he died she wept uncontrollably.
Later in her book Christina reveals more spiritual happenings. She tells how Oz’s spirit communicated with her through the spiritualist mum of a friend.
She writes what the spiritualist said: “He’s saying, ‘Coffee, white, one — man-up’. Oh, and what an awful taste, it’s something like liquorice. What is that?’ I smiled. ‘His liquorice rollies, the menthol tips, he always smoked them. And that’s how he talked’. She had his intonation exactly right.
“She always passes on an Oz message in his distinctive style.
“And it helps me to keep going and keeps me grounded.”
