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A Letter to Sophia Rose

The other night, after Sophia Rose Amoroso had her bath, she looked at her tiny hands, wrinkled from the bath water, and told her mother, Jaime, "I have Daddy's fingers."

Her father, Christopher C. Amoroso, used to tell his wife that two of his favorite things in the world were taking their 19-month-old baby for a walk, and bathing her, and he used to wiggle his wrinkly fingers at Sophia Rose.

The baby is too young to understand that her father, 29, a Port Authority police officer, died when he went back into the World Trade Center's north tower after leading a group of people to safety. She will not remember the thousands of people, including hundreds of police officers, who spilled out of Our Lady Star of the Sea Church in Staten Island for his memorial service.

But she will always have the letter he wrote her when she was 10 weeks old: "Sometimes it makes me cry, as I am overwhelmed by the joy I've been given by you and your mother. I want you to know that I consider myself the luckiest man to ever walk the face of this earth. If anything were to happen to me, I could honestly say I've known true love and happiness in my life. I've known that because of your mother and now you."

Profile published in THE NEW YORK TIMES on October 30, 2001.