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Reading Harry Potter Aloud

Rhonda Ridge Rasmussen read to her husband, Floyd, just about every night before going to bed. His eyes are bad, he says, and she enjoyed reading to him. The couple had just started a new book, one of the Harry Potter series.

There were so many other things she was looking forward to when she died, Floyd Rasmussen said of his wife, a former Sunday school teacher. For one thing, Mrs. Rasmussen, 44, who worked in the Army's budget office in the Pentagon, had not developed the photographs the couple took on a trip to Europe a month earlier.

And the Rasmussens were planning to move back to California, where they met at a church dance on Dec. 31, 1973. Mr. Rasmussen, who also works at the Pentagon, said he may still head out West without her. "It's a better place," he said. There aren't as many sad memories as there are here."

Profile published in THE NEW YORK TIMES on October 12, 2001.