Diane Parsons

Aiming to Please

Ask anyone, Diane Moore Parsons treated people like royalty. Ask her husband, Howard Parsons, what she did in her free time.

"Spoil me," he said.

Her guinea pigs ate carefully prepared salad, and she had special wildlife peanut butter for the squirrels. She would iron the underwear of her loved ones, even after they protested.

Her son Frank Tatum remembers how his sister had a cat so ornery that it was about to get her evicted. Suddenly, it belonged to Mrs. Parsons and was pleasant.

"Within two weeks that mean cat became like a big, spoiled couch cushion," he said. "Just a little time around my mother . . ."

Mrs. Parsons, 58, of Malta, N.Y., was a tax technician at the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, visiting the World Trade Center on business. "She was drop-dead gorgeous and totally unselfish," Mr. Parsons said of his wife of two years, who was also called Dani (he'd spell it Danny). On his kitchen table, underneath all the paperwork pertaining to Sept. 11, Mr. Parsons recently found the last birthday card she had sent him, which expressed how much she loved him. "That just broke me up today," he said.