CATHY T. SMITH

"Cathy Smith looked forward to many things, recalled her housemate, Jill Aney. ""She was in a loving relationship,"" Aney said. ""She had just made divisional vice president"" at Marsh & McLennan. And she was planning to take the first steps to turn her lifetime hobby of collecting baseball cards into a business, which she eventually hoped to do full-time. ""My Aunt Cathy went to work on Sept. 11 with no worries,"" her 12-year-old nephew, Michael Smith, told mourners during a recent memorial service at Marian Shrine in Stony Point. But at 8:48 a.m., the first of two hijacked airliners crashed into the World Trade Center, hitting Tower 1, where she worked on the 96th floor. ""She did not suffer,"" Michael said. ""She went in peace."" He said he would remember her as the aunt who was always there for him. For days afterward, Cathy Smith's relatives and her domestic partner, Evelyn Cedeno, held onto hope. Smith spent the last weekend of her life with her mother, Annette Smith, and her younger sister, Barbara Schielzo. They took their mother shopping for her birthday at Woodbury Common, an outlet center in Orange County. ""We've never laughed so hard,"" Schielzo recalled. Their brother, Vincent, said the only consolation he could find in the tragedy was the gentleness with which people have treated one another in its aftermath, with ""strangers crying on strangers' shoulders, people helping in any way they could, people donating supplies."""