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“She was very lovely. Very caring. It’s very sad that she’s gone. Very sad the way she went,” said Shannon Sharun, who had Rachael Longridge come to her home twice a week to help with household tasks.

Sharun’s partner, Chad Kidner, said the young woman was always cheerful and smiling.

“She definitely would have been an asset to the nursing community,” he said.

Photo by Kucerak, Ian / Postmedia

Hugging and dabbing away tears in front of the Edmonton Clinic Health Academy building, Bourque and her close friend and classmate Dakota Bergem reminisced about the hours they spent studying in the building, and how Rachael Longridge would always be the voice of reason when Bergem began worrying she might have symptoms of the diseases they were learning about.

Nursing students and organizations from across Canada have contacted them to pass along their sympathies, they said.

Friends took turns at the microphone to share tales of how Rachael Longridge went out of her way to help those she loved, including borrowing a friend’s car to rush across the city to be with her childhood buddy Rachel Clarke when her dying dog was being put down.

“We gotta do Rachael right,” said Marlee Butti, who had known her since she was four. “We’ve got to be happy. We’ve got to keep going. She was the most amazing person I ever knew. … We’ve all got to do something amazing with our lives to honour her.”

At age nine, Rachael Longridge and her 10-year-old cousin set up a memorial to honour the victims of a 2004 Russian school hostage-taking in which more than 340 people died, including 155 children, according to Postmedia’s archives.