9/11 Daughter Transforms Grief Into Purpose With Equine Therapy Nonprofit

William Lawrence Fallon Jr. called his house on the morning of September 11, 2001, as he did most mornings. He worked as an IT manager at Cantor Fitzgerald, high up in the World Trade Center, and he had a habit of ringing home early—before his daughters left for school, before the day's weight settled in. His daughter Kayla, eight years old, would sometimes pick up the phone. He'd tell her to have a good morning. He'd describe the skyline from his desk, the way clouds sometimes hung below him while the sun broke through above. He was the kind of father who woke before dawn to work out, who arranged his schedule around her dancing lessons, who made those small morning calls feel like the most important part of his day.

That Tuesday, Kayla spoke to him once, early. Later, after the first plane hit, he called again. This time her mother answered. "I'm getting out. I'm coming home," he told her. Then he said, "Turn on the news." He hung up. No one in the family heard from him again. He was 38 years old.

Kayla Fallon Smith is 33 now, and those words—I'm getting out, I'm coming home—still sit with her. She has spent a quarter-century learning that grief does not follow the timeline people promise. It does not fade neatly. It transforms, it returns, it becomes part of how you move through the world. In her case, it became the foundation of her life's work.

After her father's death, Smith grew up surrounded by resources meant to help 9/11 families. Counseling was available. Support networks existed. But something was missing for her—a space that felt truly safe, truly quiet, where the noise in her head could settle. She didn't find that until years later, during graduate school, when she encountered equine-assisted therapy. Horses, she discovered, could be present with you in ways that words sometimes could not. They asked nothing of you except that you show up. They responded to your state of being without judgment or expectation.

In 2019, Smith founded Trails of Purpose, a nonprofit dedicated to offering free mental health counseling and equine-assisted therapy to military members, veterans, first responders, and their families. She became a licensed mental health counselor. She built the thing she believed she had needed as a child: a community rooted in understanding, a place that was safe and quiet and restorative. The organization has now delivered thirty thousand hours of free therapy and counseling. The horses stand in pastures waiting for people whose brains feel like they are on fire, whose words have run out, whose grief or trauma or fear needs a witness that does not speak.

Smith speaks about her father's story often. She does not let it become a relic. Instead, she uses it to point toward something larger—the feeling that existed on September 12th, 2001, when the country seemed to remember, for a moment, what it meant to hold each other up. That collective memory, she believes, is crucial education for generations who did not live through it. It is a reminder that grief, while it does not heal in the way people say it does, can be transformed into purpose. It can become a doorway through which others find their way toward healing.