Young figure skater who died left a lasting legacy.

Byline: Jo Ann Barnas

DETROIT _ Emily Greco had the gift of a loving heart.

Her mother is thinking about that now as she sits in the solitude of her house, a candle burning on a nearby hallway table in memory of her daughter.

It is hard for Edna Greco to talk about her daughter's death, but not any harder than living silently with the pain.

Always, she has something of Emily's with her. The silver ring she gave her daughter last summer _ a gift after Emily landed her first single axel _ dangles from a chain around her neck. In her left hand, she holds a key chain with her daughter's nickname, Emmie, spelled out in beads. She fingers it like a rosary.

"It's a lifelong death sentence for me," Edna Greco says, her voice trembling. "I've realized the opposite of love is pain. People say it gets better. It doesn't. You just learn to live with it. My 11-year-old _ something has to come from this. She didn't live for nothing."

Emily Greco, who was a sixth-grader at Jefferson Middle School in St. Clair Shores, died Oct. 5 of bacterial meningitis. She was the second Detroit area youth to die of the disease last fall, shortly after the school year began.

Emily was a figure skater whose spins and spirals came more naturally than her jumps. But what Emily couldn't accomplish on the ice, she more than made up for with her compassion, a gift her mother hopes will be her child's legacy.

At 10, Emily started her own foundation _ Kids Helping Other Kids _ to benefit children with special needs. Today, her family and friends are carrying on with the cause at the same time they are carrying on with life. One has been easier than the other.

"They say we're all here to learn lessons," Edna Greco says. "I truly believe that Emily was here to teach us all one. When perfect strangers call me and say, `You don't know me, but she changed my life' _ it doesn't take my pain away, but it is something."

"When you talked with your precious words,

you touched me in my heart.

I want you to be by my side for the rest of my life

guiding me to make the right choices.

HERO."

They sat side-by-side at Memorial Park, mother and daughter, eating lunch at the end-of-the-summer picnic for the special-needs program in St. Clair Shores.

It was August 1999. Emily had just turned 10.

"She finished lunch, and I was sitting across from a couple, talking, and then they left," Edna Greco recalled. "I looked over at Emily. She had tears welling up, and a tear rolled down her face. I said, `What's wrong with you?' She said, `Look at that, Mom.' "

Edna looked to her right. Two special-needs staff members were lifting a boy from his wheelchair onto a swing.

"That is so sad," Emily said.

Edna told her daughter: "We take for granted _ you can run over there right now and jump on that swing and swing as high as you want anytime. And that little boy can't. That's where it takes the money. These people have to be specially trained to help."

Emily, still in tears, looked at her mother.

"I'm going to raise a thousand dollars next year!" she said.

Eight months…