Positivity: The incredible story of the girl who went to her own funeral

From Caledonia, Michigan via the UK Daily Mail:

Last updated at 22:55pm on 2nd May 2008

How many people can explain what it feels like to listen to their own funeral service?
Well, 21-year-old Whitney Cerak can - although, hardly surprisingly, even she struggles to find the words to do so.

One afternoon last August, she sat beside her father at the family dining table and pressed “play” to hear the definitive summing up of her young life.

More than 1,400 people had packed into the church, in the American town of Caledonia, Michigan, to say goodbye to her in 2006, and the proceedings had been recorded. No one could have dreamed that one day Whitney herself would be able to listen to their tributes.

“I can barely describe how it felt,” she says. “Odd. Weird. Surreal. A bit scary. I’m the only person I know who has listened to their own funeral.

“It was as if they were talking about someone else. People were saying wonderful things about me - about how I had touched their lives. I thought, ‘All this? For me?’. That bit was humbling.

“But mostly I found it upsetting. To hear the eulogy, my dad’s voice, my sister talking about all the parts of her life that I wasn’t going to share - that was hard. I don’t think I will be listening to it again.”

It sounds like the implausible plot of some cheap soap opera, but what happened to Whitney Cerak and her family was all too real.

She found herself at the centre of one of the most astonishing cases of mistaken identity ever, when she was wrongly named as the dead victim of a terrible road accident.

Four students and one teacher were involved in the collision in the town of Fort Worth, in April 2006. Five died at the scene and the only survivor - a pretty blonde girl who was discovered unconscious with serious head injuries - was identified as 22-year-old Laura Van Ryn, partly because Laura’s purse was found next to her.

The badly injured girl was not Laura, however, but Whitney, who was then just days from her 19th birthday.

It was the sort of mistake that would normally be picked up quickly, at least as soon as relatives were involved, but in this case, it wasn’t.

The Van Ryn family - summoned to what they were told was their critically-ill daughter’s bedside - were warned they might be shocked by her appearance and not to expect to recognise her.

There were bandages on her head, and her features were terribly swollen. Not once did they actually question her identity - but, in the circumstances, what family would?

Similarly, the Cerak family, who had been told their daughter was dead, were too deep in grief to question anything. Because of the nature of her injuries, they declined to see Whitney’s body, preferring to remember her as she was.

Unwittingly, then, both families were set on a terrible course, each accepting a fate that was simply not theirs.

What happened next is still unthinkable. For an incredible five weeks, the Van Ryn family kept a vigil over Whitney (whom they believed to be their daughter Laura), willing her to emerge from her coma.

They held her hand, told her repeatedly that they loved her, and willed her to come back to them. They tracked every tiny step in her recovery with jubilant updates on a family internet “blog”, encouraging everyone to pray for her.

Meanwhile, the Cerak family got on with the terrible business of grieving. They buried “Whitney” (though it was of course Laura), filling the church with her favourite gerbera flowers, and having her friends create posters in celebration of her young life.

These and the order of service and hundreds of sympathy cards they received were put away in a drawer for posterity. Little did they realise, their daughter would one day be able to see them for herself.

Had anyone been looking for them, there were hints in that hospital that all was not as it seemed.

“Laura”, by now conscious, was behaving oddly and calling out strange names.

Staggeringly, though, the truth only came to light when she was asked to write down her own name on a piece of paper. She managed just one chilling word: ‘W-h-i-t-n-e-y.’ …..

Go here for the rest of the story.