Richard Miuccio

Dreams of Retirement

He survived combat in Vietnam and it appeared that he had finally beaten prostate cancer after a rough siege of chemotherapy. Richard Miuccio and his wife, Joyce, were finally at the brink of their retirement dream to camp across the country in an R.V.

"He always used to say as soon as he turned 55 he would retire," said John C. Bilotti, a friend from their teenage years in the South Beach housing projects in Staten Island. "He counted the days."

But Mr. Miuccio, who turned 55 in May, never got around to filing the necessary papers with the State Department of Taxation and Finance, where he had worked for 35 years, rising to audit supervisor. "He just kept putting it off," Mrs. Miuccio said. He was generally meticulous and methodical, whether it was at work or while playing poker, handicapping horse races or visiting his mother at St. Elizabeth Ann's nursing home every day without fail for three years.

Mrs. Miuccio, who first met her husband when she was 13, now gravitates to his home desk, where he often worked instead of going to the office — there was a meeting on Sept. 11 — feeling closest to him there. "He was my whole life," she said. "He was everything to me."