PORTLAND – A retired minister attended his granddaughter’s funeral in Michigan and grieved the loss. A month later, he’s celebrating the news that there was a mix-up and that she actually survived a deadly highway collision.

The Rev. Emil Frank said he spent Wednesday alternating between laughing and crying and that he’s “emotionally drained” from the experience.

“We’re just so excited. I still can’t get over it. It’s like a fairy tale. It’s just so hard to believe,” Frank told The Associated Press.

As the family of Whitney Cerak celebrated, the family of another college student, Laura VanRyn, suffered through the news that VanRyn was dead.

Cerak and VanRyn, students at Indiana’s Taylor University, were in a university van that was smashed by a tractor-trailer that drifted across a median on Interstate 69 on April 26. Four students and a university employee were killed.

For the past month, VanRyn’s parents had been by Cerak’s side, believing the girl with the bruised and swollen face was their daughter.

The young woman was transferred from an Indiana hospital to a rehabilitation facility in Grand Rapids, Mich. As she began regaining consciousness, she said things that made them question her identity, the VanRyn family said.

In a statement, the two families said they took their concerns to hospital officials, and dental records confirmed that the injured woman was Whitney Cerak.

Frank attended what he thought was Cerak’s funeral. He said his daughter, Colleen, declined to view what they believed was her daughter’s body.

“She didn’t want to look at her in the mangled condition,” he said. “They never even looked at the body. They wanted to remember her the way she was.”

Officials at Taylor University, an evangelical Christian college in Upland, Ind., about 60 miles northeast of Indianapolis, confirmed the case of mistaken identity.

“It’s just so unbelievable. But we feel just as much for the family that found out it was not their daughter,” Frank said.

Frank said Thursday that Whitney Cerak’s mother has been at her side and that her father arrived from a trip to New York to see her for the first time Wednesday night. “He just wept and wept,” Frank said.

As for Whitney Cerak, she had her hair done by her mother, and she put some lipstick on, Frank said. “She’s doing very well,” he said. “She’s talking quite a bit more.”

Frank is unsure how Cerak knows about what happened, but he doubts she has been told everything. “Someday when she finds out, she’s going to really say. ‘I’ve had an experience of a lifetime.’ She’ll use it to give God praise,” he said.