Friends, colleagues pay tribute to cyclist hit by truck on Monday
As flowers and teddy bears piled up on the corner where a young woman lost her life Monday — an impromptu shrine to the first cyclist killed in Montreal this year — her identity was confirmed by Urgences Santé, where she worked as an emergency medical dispatcher.
Valérie Bertrand Desrochers, whose job it was to help others through medical crises, was known for her professionalism, her humour and her heart.
She died on her way to work Monday morning at 7:30, as she was riding along the bike path on St. Zotique St. and was hit by a dump truck turning right.
By Tuesday afternoon, a tribute posted online by one of her colleagues at 911 was shared more than 2,600 times. It painted an eloquent portrait of Bertrand Desrochers, whose voice was a lifeline to so many.
In comparison to the faceless, nameless, voiceless cyclist mentioned in so many news reports on Monday, her face, wrote Annie Thérien, was the one you’d find raising awareness of post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide prevention, when she wasn’t saving lives on the phone.
Her face was also the one that was demolished when lives were lost, she wrote.
Written in response to an online comment rejoicing about “one fewer cyclist on the road,” Thérien said Bertrand Desrochers’s voice was the voice of “calm in the terror.”
“It was the voice of hope in the darkness, the voice that counted at what rhythm you had to pump a heart, the one that told you how to stop the bleeding, the one that told you how to get your child breathing before the ambulance arrived. It was the voice that responded to tragedy, before succumbing to it herself.”
As calls were renewed to reduce or eliminate the blind spots on trucks or eliminate these trucks on city streets, friends on Facebook changed their profile picture to the emblem of the emergency medical responder. Rest in peace, they wrote, followed by the radio code 10-89 — the shift is over.