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i said, well, my daughter s home. they said, could you get her on the phone? so i got out of bed. and still not really thinking that clearly. give carly the phone, wake her up. and i went downstairs to get on the other extension. and that s when they said, we have reason to believe that your daughter, whitney, is alive. a statement so unexpected, so overwhelming, she couldn t even comprehend it at first. you know, then you go really your whole body goes, oh, now, i know that s not true. we buried our daughter. and i said we know for sure that the girl in the hospital in grand rapids is not laura van ryn and we think that it s whitney. could you get some dental records and come down here? colleen, at this point, how high up in your body did you allow that swell of hope to rise? there wasn t any hope at that point. it was more of like a duty. you know, just close this door. i know it s not whitney. it s something that we needed to ....
it was hard? hard for you to think that everything was going to be okay? it was hard, yeah. i m not a hospital person. the machines every beep, every nonbeep, everything that stopped scared me, everything that started, you know, was unsettling. i didn t know what everything was for. and, yeah, i was fearful. i was shaky today, laurie, wanting so badly for you to wake up. it s not like you to be so still. wake up, sweetie. i want to talk to you and see your beautiful face and look into your eyes. i love you. mom. the family took turns keeping a 24-hour vigil by laura s bedside. whitney s family was keeping a different kind of vigil. on saturday, the 29th of april, a day before the funeral, you held a visitation. and, boy, a lot of people came. ....
she left me a message, i believe, on their trip up to fort wayne. i didn t call her back. at about 8:00 p.m., their work done, laura and whitney, along with seven other students and staff members were riding in a school van heading south on interstate 69 toward the main campus. whitney s sister carly, also a student at taylor, was the first to hear that something was wrong. my friend ben drove up and told me that there was an accident and he thought that whitney was in it. so i called her cell phone and there was no answer. i started to kind of worry. i called her cell phone again and again. now i just started noticing people just kind of running around everywhere and coming up to me and talking to me and asking me if i had talked to whitney. did they talk about the severity of the accident at that time to you? i was hearing that people had died in the accident but not everyone had died. carly and whitney s mom was home in gaylord, a five-hour ....
Strength, when i am so weak. only he could uphold me as he has. while laura s family prepared for a long struggle to save their daughter, whitney s family couldn t yet bring themselves to say good-bye. on april 27th, the day after the crash, taylor university held a prayer service for the victims. whitney s mom colleen attended. they had the big projector screen, and they would flash the names of the different victims that had died. and then everybody in there was praying for that person on the screen. sorry i keep crying. i just remember the first time that they put whitney s name up there. i thought that i would really cry hard, but i felt just such at peace that every single person in there was praying for our family at that point. ....
She s been in an accident. it took me a second or so to kind of grasp that. then i just looked at don and i said i think you better get on the phone. he told us there had been an accident, a serious accident. and she was in critical condition and we would need to, you know, start making our way down there. within minutes they were speeding toward indiana, a 2 1/2 hour drive. they kept getting phone calls from the hospital and they struggled to grasp the severity of laura s injuries. she was unconscious is what they told us in the car. unconscious. right. did we know then that she had some broken bones, perhaps? probably. we knew then that she had a head injury because they were calling permission to put the spike, they call it, into her head that monitors her swelling or bleeding of the brain. so we gave them that permission, of course. ....