Part I: Christmas Eve

We’ve had an interesting three days of Christmas, jam-packed with hospital visits, near-death hikes, blackouts, and a little bit of holiday joy. In order to get it all out, I’m splitting my holiday posts in multiple parts. Part I begins on Christmas Eve.

David went to work [not to actually do any work, but to sit around for a few hours] while I put the finishing touches on his Christmas gift scavenger hunt [more on that later]. Once David got home from work, we hooked up our webcam and connected with David’s family in Atlanta to watch each other open our Christmas presents. His family generally opens their gifts on Christmas Eve (which is sacrilegious in my opinion) but it ended up being a good thing, otherwise we would have had to wake up at 4 a.m. to open presents with them on Christmas day. It was sheer madness on his parents’ side, but it was nice to see each other despite the distance.

So we opened presents which is always a delightful thing to do in my opinion despite what may be inside of them. After we got off the phone/webcam with them, we ordered pizza from Papa Johns (it's a Hayman family tradtion to eat pizza on Christmas Eve). We decided to do pizza for lunch since we’d been invited over to a friend’s house (the Siebachs, the only other young married couple without children in our ward) for a dinner party with some of their other friends. We were just getting started on our holiday feast, when David received the first of our bad news.

While living in Monterey, David and, to a lesser extent I, became good friends with an older couple who were serving in our single’s ward as adult advisors (second counselor in the Bishopric). The Orsburns were unable to have children of their own and they opened up their home to all the young military men and women from the single’s ward who had no home to go to. Many of them, like David, came to consider the Orsburns as a second family and were called their kids. Brad and Charlie came to Hawaii last week for a vacation, chosen not only for Hawaii’s attractions, but also because the most number of their “children” were now living here. About two years ago, Brad had a terrible bike accident which left him with a brain injury with many residual side effects. While on vacation, he came down with a bad cold and that morning, before they were set to fly home to California on Christmas day, Charlie insisted that Brad go to the doctor just to be on the safe side. They discovered that he had a blood clot in his lung and two in his legs and he was checked into a hospital in Pearl City. Had he gotten on the plane, the altitude and pressure might have moved the blood clots in the wrong direction and killed him. He's stuck in the hospital until the blood clots clear up which could be another week. Worst vacation ever.

About five minutes after hanging up with Charlie, after promising to visit them in the hospital, David remembered that Brother Spencer, the second counselor in our current ward, had called him while he was at work and wanted him to call back. So, thinking nothing of it, David dialed up the Spencers and received more bad news. Our stake president, President Kim, and his wife, Linda, are extremely well-respected and well-known through Hawaii and Taiwan, where they had served as mission presidents. (Sister Kim is Taiwanese.) They also happened to be David’s mission presidents for the first five months of his mission in Taichung, Taiwan. Needless to say, David and I love the Kims, and their whole, huge extended family that all live in Hawaii.

On Christmas Eve, Sister Kim started complaining of a headache in the morning, and while they were at the hospital, a brain aneursym ruptured and she was left brain dead, with no chance of recovery. This news came as a huge shock to both of us. We had just gone to the Kim’s house on Monday to deliver Christmas cookies and while Sister Kim had a cold, she was otherwise in good health and spirits. It’s one thing to hear of the death of someone who knew was ill or old, but quite another to hear of the death of someone you didn’t think would be gone so soon. It’s the first time I’ve experienced first-hand an unexpected death like this and it hit me hard. I will miss Sister Kim a great deal. David always looked forward to speaking Chinese with her every Sunday, and she was one of the few sisters in the ward who ever speaks to me or sits next to me in Relief Society. She was our music conductor and organ/piano player (she taught piano at BYU Hawaii) and an all-around positive person. It’s hard to imagine that she is no longer around.

After hearing such bad news in quick succession, David and I managed to gulp down the rest of our pizza and then got ourselves ready to head to Kapiolani Medical Center to visit Brad and Charlie. Another of their Monterey kids arrived as well. After a short visit, we led Charlie back to the home she was staying in (with another of her kids, who lives near us in Mililani) and got her settled in with food and company and we headed over to the Siebach’s home (who are also friends with Brad and Charlie) for our Christmas Eve party, only two hours late.

We quickly filled up on Gaby Siebach’s homemade tamales (so good!) and pozole, while the group played Scene It and passed around presents. We stayed up late talking about this and that, and generally taking our minds off of the afternoon's unpleasantness. We finally stumbled home around 11 p.m., got ready for bed and quickly fell asleep, dreaming of the Christmas fun yet to come.

I'll be back with more about Christmas and the day after. Don't worry.....it gets a lot better.