In the weeks after her husband was killed in the crash of United Airlines Flight 93, Lyz Glick worried that time might dull the sharp intensity of her stories or erode her memories of a million shared moments.

	Lyz Glick with her daughter Emerson in 2002. (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette)

More importantly, she feared, her recollections and those of loved ones and friends would be lost to Emerson, their tiny blonde daughter who was just 12 weeks old when her father died Sept. 11, 2001, while fighting to regain control of hijacked Flight 93.

A sales manager for an Internet services firm and a former collegiate judo champion, Jeremy Glick was 31 when Flight 93 crashed into a field near Shanksville, Somerset County. The world quickly came to know him and other passengers as heroes who saved other lives from hijackers who likely intended to crash into a landmark in Washington, D.C.

But Lyz Glick wanted to make sure Emerson would know all the other, more intimate things about her father: his years-long campaign to woo and win her mother, his dedication to his family and friends, and, above all, his utter devotion to her.

Glick began a journal, writing letters to her husband and her daughter.

Three years later, out of those missives has grown a book, "Your Father's Voice," published by St. Martin's Press, in which she and co-author Dan Zegart chart her life with and without Jeremy and her quest to fulfill their goal of building a happy life for their child.

"Jeremy was such a news sensation of Sept. 11, but that was just a part of who he was," said Glick, 34, who still lives in the lakeside home in Hewitt, N.J., that she shared with her husband of five years.

"I had things I really wanted to say about his love of family, his love of his daughter. Those are things that people can try to accomplish in their own everyday lives, to be a wonderful brother or a great friend," she said.

The latest of hundreds of books published about Sept. 11 but one of only a handful about Flight 93, "Your Father's Voice" is a frank, eloquent series of letters to now 3-year-old Emmy. In chapters that veer back and forth through time, Glick shares her love affair with the "soulmate" she met in ninth-grade science class and her post-9/11 struggle to structure a new life for herself and her daughter.

	Jeremy Glick

Part of that struggle has been to strike a balance between confronting sorrow and heeding her husband's plea that she and her daughter lead joyful lives.

Jeremy called from the plane, telling her that "bad men" were in control and that he and other passengers were planning to fight back.

"You've got to promise me you're going to be happy," he told her. "For Emmy to know how much I love her. And because whatever decisions you make in your life, no matter what, I'll support you."

"That's still very hard, and I don't think there is ever a mastery," Glick said in a recent interview. "But I'm able to look forward on a Monday to Friday now. It would be easier to be sad sometimes. But it is important to me to provide a happy, stable home."

For weeks after 9/11, Glick sat before the Web site of Internet bookseller Amazon and typed in "widow and death," searching for other perspectives that would help her analyze and bear her emotions.

Dozens of books later, she realized that setting down her own experience might comfort other bereaved people. She also was determined that her husband's story would not be politicized, and that his image not be remolded into a two-dimensional icon.

"I wanted to tell my story in the way I wanted it told and get it out there," she said. "It was a very healing process."

Initially, she wrote on her own, but after finding that too difficult, she dictated her thoughts into a tape recorder for Zegart, a New Jersey journalist, to organize. With tender or funny details and sometimes brutal honesty, she recounts breakups and reconciliations, family conflict and mutual mistakes.

The result is a forthright story that is as much hers as her husband's, mapping out her discovery of insights and anecdotes about her husband as well as her own passage through grief.

There were her repeated calls to his cell phone, just to hear his recording on voice mail. There were mornings that started with wailing and hours lost staring at his clothes. There was euphoria when she found an unfinished videotape of Jeremy and Emmy that seemed to be a postcard from heaven.

With moving conviction, she also writes of faith and incidents that reinforced it, such as the golden cloud that she and a friend saw hovering above her bed the first night after Jeremy's death. Later, Emmy's toy violin -- an instrument Jeremy had played -- inexplicably kept playing strains of Mozart even after she yanked out its batteries.

Sharing their last, deeply personal conversation with the world -- first in news accounts after the crash and then in more detail in her book -- is not the obvious decision for a woman who calls herself a "pretty private person."

But keeping it to herself, Glick said, would have resulted in an incomplete snapshot that reflected what Jeremy did on Flight 93 but not what spurred him or what he'd given her and his daughter in that final call.

"We had such an open, honest relationship, and for me not to be that way in telling the story was to not be myself," she said. "I'm not a flaky person, but it was as if our souls were touching. If you're going to have a last conversation, I'm glad it was like this and not full of chaos."

She also tells of traveling to the crash site in Shanksville and of her appreciation of weeping people who stood for miles along roads in Somerset and Westmoreland counties to pay tribute to the families of Flight 93.

"Jeremy and I were small-town people from the type of place where people were bringing over dinners and pies [after his death]," she said. "The same sense of community came forth from the people of Shanksville."

Glick visited the White House after the crash and attended a government session for families to hear Flight 93's "black box" recording. But she has mostly withdrawn from public events and interviews, and she is careful about what she reads or watches on television, knowing that upsetting references to 9/11 may crop up anywhere.

She started to read the 9/11 Commission's report, then put it down. She commends families who pushed for the report, saying "answers weren't coming forward," but said her way of coping has been to turn inward to family and friends.

"My daughter is the greatest gift and that is what is important. My perspective on the world has changed a little bit. Now I think anything can happen at anytime and it's really important to embrace your life," she said. "I think I did that before, but more so now."

Glick has resumed teaching anthropology classes online from her home for Berkeley College in New York. She opted not to do a tour to promote her book, saying she didn't want to leave her daughter or be asked for opinions about political or legal issues.

Now in pre-school, Emmy is a sweet-tempered child with her father's broad smile, out-of-control curls and strong will. She loves dressing up in Disney princess garb -- Pocahontas for Halloween -- and she is surrounded by people who love her, her mother said.

Emmy hasn't asked many questions about how her father died, but Glick has consulted with a therapist on the best way to answer.

At the end of August, around their wedding anniversary and Jeremy's birthday and just before Sept. 11, Glick again pulled out the videotape of her husband and baby daughter. She doesn't do that often, but watching it reminded her of that early fear of forgetting some tale that Emmy should know, and how it led her to the task that has nurtured her as well.

"When you have a love like that, it's imprinted in [you]," she said. "It was a very good process for me to go back and pull out these stories from his friends. A chapter closed in a very real sense," she said.

"But to hear his life, his voice again, I smiled inside myself. I could never forget that."