CHRISTOPHER C. AMOROSO: 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."
.
