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Always Giving Her All

Giving defined Dolores M. Costa. "My wife had a heart of gold -- she was very soft," said her husband, Charles, who said people were drawn to her blue eyes and her smile.

"She would be up at 5 o'clock every morning to go to work, and from the minute she got up she was giving," he said. "She was giving to me, to her home, to strangers in the street. She gave herself. And when she was at her job, she was giving 110 percent."

Mrs. Costa, who would have turned 54 on Sept. 13, rose to the position of vice president at Fred Alger Management, on the 93rd floor of 1 World Trade Center.

Her evenings were spent crocheting colorful afghans for friends and talking with her husband about life. Mornings she fed finches, warblers and sparrows that lived in the birdhouses in her backyard in Port Monmouth, N.J. She was planning an 80th birthday party for her mother.

"She was really a good daughter," said Marie Barbosa of Brooklyn. "She worried about me, and now she is gone. That is the sad part of it all."

Profile published in THE NEW YORK TIMES on October 25, 2001.