In three-week-old wedding photos, Katie and David Schrauger look like a model bride and groom newly in love.
There is peace in their eyes, giddiness in their smiles.
In pictures, the pain is invisible.
But everyone at their wedding knew the meaning of the hymn read at their ceremony titled "It is well with my soul."
They are words that seem impossible for a family struck with unimaginable grief this year.
The smiles in the photos hide heartache from months earlier when David, 24, an Army specialist, had a near brush with death after his Humvee was hit by a roadside bomb in Iraq on Father's Day.
Then his parents lost their Lake Orion home in a foreclosure this summer. His father had left his job to be at David's side as he recovered from a collapsed lung, spine and neck fractures, shrapnel that pierced his limbs and infections.
Then, when it didn't seem like it could get any worse, it got much worse.
The family was crushed with the greatest tragedy in September. As David recuperated at an Army hospital in Texas, his younger brothers Josh, 17 and Tim, 14, got in a car accident back home that killed both of them.
They were supposed to be his groomsmen.
"Through this whole thing, God has given us grace, I don't know how," David said softly, holding hands with new wife Katie, 22, who is from Mundy Township.
"We're never going to understand everything. It's still hard to imagine the why of it."
"It is well with my soul," he said, quoting the hymn read during their wedding in the chapel of Texas-based Brooke Army Medical Center where David is still getting treated.
But then he added his own line: "As troubled as it is."
Despite the sorrow, the couple says they're healing together.
David, a Fairview native, smiles when he talks about his parents looking happy as they danced at his sister Kristina's wedding recently.
The newlyweds even giggle when they look at their wedding album and talk about the year-long courtship laced with travails.
How David put a ring on a ribbon around his neck when he proposed because he didn't trust his hand movements after his attack.
Or how painful it was to get down on one very sore knee.
"I had to practice it a few times until I said 'I can do this without falling over,'" he laughed.
They even joke about the wiry contraption that temporarily juts out of David's arm and that kept him from wearing an overcoat at the wedding.
"It feels like we've finally started our lives together officially," Katie said. "You learn how much to appreciate each other and to look at the positives.
"We're focusing on making memories with the family we still have."
That includes Christmas, which they feel lucky to be spending in Michigan.
The couple has been living in San Antonio where David still works to regain muscle movement in mostly his arms. But they're on a brief visit home, with Katie taking over David's care.
"It's been a really rough year for the family," said Katie's mom Nancy Welliver, who lives in Mundy Township with husband, Scott.
"Their story is incredible. It's a love story, it's tragic, it's joyous."
Their story started a year ago when the two saw each other at a mutual friend's wedding.
David, who had already served a brief tour of Afghanistan in 2005 and was about to be sent to Iraq, wore his uniform.
"We were both looking spiffy and checking each other out," David recalled. "But I was shy. We never said a word to each other."
Their first conversation happened later in cyberspace with her in Michigan and him in Baghdad. Katie, then a Baker College student, noticed he was online through MySpace and typed "What time is it over there?"
By Christmas of last year, online chatting became constant, sometimes hours long. They talked about their families, daily life and religious values.
"I would be laughing as I was typing," Katie said.
Then in April, when he was home on leave, she greeted him at the airport.
"I just ran to her and we held each other for hours," David said. They saw each other everyday he was home. "We knew we'd get married."
But young love was tested right away.
The day before the June attack, Katie talked to David on the phone and reminded him to call his father on Father's Day.
Nearly 40 hours went by and no one in the family had heard from him.
"I knew something was wrong," she said.
David was driving a Humvee back to a safe zone and didn't see the hidden improvised explosive device that flung the vehicle into a sewer trench. Another soldier in the vehicle was killed.
"I don't remember much of it," he said. "I just remember seeing my lieutenant yell 'we're going to get you out' and then looking up at a medic in a Bradley and saying 'I made it.'"
His family met him at an Army hospital in Germany and Katie joined them at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.
"He looked a lot different from the last time," she said. "It was very overwhelming. I was worried."
When she saw him, he had both arms and one leg in casts up to the tips, a neck brace, bruises, a web of wires and wound vacs sucking blood and other material from his body to prevent swelling.
"This whole time she stuck with me through the end," he said. "Some guys would have to worry about 'will she still love me after she sees me?' After that, I knew she wasn't going to leave."
That was followed by 30 to 40 surgeries in Texas where Katie visited often.
"A lot of people may have run away but not Katie," said Katie's former piano teacher, Janet Walworth of Holly Township. "She took care of him because she loves him.
"They're going to make it because of that kind of loyalty and love. You don't see people stick together like that anymore. He's just going to get better and better and they have good families behind them."
Meanwhile, the plight of David's parents, Cliff and Vicki Schrauger, who lost their home to foreclosure while their son recovered from war wounds, was chronicled in the media.
There was some good news for the family when during Labor Day, David proposed and wedding planning began.
But on Sept. 29, while Cliff Schrauger was at the hospital with David, he got a phone call. David's brothers had been in an accident.
"He came back in the room and said 'it's as bad as you can imagine,'" David said, getting teary. "It hit me like a ton of bricks. I couldn't believe it was real."
The next day, David's dad returned to Michigan while Katie moved to San Antonio.
After hard-fought military permission, David, Katie and a physician flew to Michigan for his brothers' funeral.
Sometimes, he says, he still breaks into stories about his brothers, such as being with Josh when he shot his first deer and getting Katie's engagement ring and goofing around with Tim.
"The other day we saw a movie ... and there was a line 'you're the best big brother I could ever ask for,'" he said. "It made me teary because I was their big brother. It made me miss them so much."
Meanwhile, David sometimes watches the news but says it doesn't show the progress he saw in Iraq. He stays optimistic about war efforts and "can't wait to see the guys from my unit come home."
He and Katie will stay in Texas until David, who was awarded a Purple Heart and who will likely become medically retired, is completely healed. They aren't sure what's next.
"So many incredible things have happened since (the tragic events)," David said. "I know God's in control and I believe that with all my heart."
"God has really spared my life."
http://blog.mlive.com/flin
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