7-Year-Old Went to Grief Camp Months After Her Dad Died on 9/11. She Hasn’t Left Since (Exclusive)

“I turned my pain into a purpose by doing what I do,” Katie Pereira tells PEOPLE

NEED TO KNOW

• Katie Pereira was 7 years old when her dad, Franco Lalama, was killed on 9/11
• Pereira attended Comfort Zone Camp, the nonprofit bereavement camp, that November and 25 years later, she’s now a regional camp director
• “I have now lived these 25 years honoring him the best way I know how,” she tells PEOPLE

One of Katie Pereira’s favorite childhood memories was going with her father to work on the 64th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower.

“I used to sleep under his desk while he was working and take a nap,” the self-described “daddy’s girl” tells PEOPLE. Then, at the end of the day, the two would go to the Discovery Channel Store and the Warner Bros. Studio Store in the underground mall.

But that all changed on Sept. 11, 2001, when Pereira was 7 years old and her dad, Franco Lalama, became one of nearly 3,000 people who didn’t come home.

Pereira recalls how a co-worker told her mom Linda that Lalama, 45, cleared everyone out of the office when the attacks unfolded that morning. He made sure that no one was left behind and, as legend has it, told others: “Go ahead. I’ll follow.”

“We’ll never truly know, but I like to find comfort in the fact that he helped people in his final moments,” Pereira says.

And she adds that it would have been just like her dad to take charge. As the oldest boy in a family of seven children, he grew up feeling a sense of responsibility for others.

Pereira, now 32 and a mom herself, tells PEOPLE that one of the hardest realizations is that she doesn’t remember a lot about her father, or their time together.

“I often find myself thinking like, ‘Did that actually happen?’ It doesn’t even feel like that’s a real memory,” she says. “So I’m often having to talk to my mom and be like, ‘Hey, I remember this. This happened? Yes or no?’ ”

One thing she is certain of is that the nonprofit bereavement camp Comfort Zone Camp — which she attended in November 2001 — changed her life.

“I finally had a place where my feelings were valid,” she says, noting the immense power she felt as a kid, knowing she could “share everything I wanted to share about my dad and my grief journey, and then be around other people realizing that I truly was not alone.”

Growing up in the small town of Nutley, N.J., located less than 15 miles outside Manhattan, Pereira — the youngest of three sisters — says that everyone at her Catholic school knew her dad and her family.

After his death, she couldn’t help but feel like she was “always being watched.”

“There was this expectation of like, ‘Okay, well, what is she going to do next? Is she going to cry today? Is she going to be happy?’ And it just felt really weird and just not a fun environment to be in,” she says.

Instead, she found herself facing emotions and feelings that even some adults have a difficult time navigating — while, at the same time, she was also just trying to be a kid.

As much as going to grief camp that first year helped, so too did the fact that she kept coming back.

After attending every session she could as a kid, she now works as a regional director for the camp, which has now helped more than 27,000 grieving kids and operates in 12 states.

“Grief doesn’t have to be the end of your story — Katie is proof of that,” says Hughes, who founded the camp in 1998 and was featured in PEOPLE just one month before 9/11. “Watching her grow into an incredible wife, mother, and Regional Director has been one of the greatest privileges of my life.”

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Pereira says becoming a mom to two children, including a daughter who is now 7, has been therapeutic, too.

“People just discredit kids when they’re young and think that they don’t know what’s going on or they can’t understand, but they do,” she shares. “It’s like, I’m looking at her, and she is fully capable of understanding the world around her and what’s going on.”

“It’s been weird and has been hard watching that, but it’s also been healing to look at myself and think, ‘Okay, I wasn’t crazy. I did know what was going on. I was able to understand,’ ” she continues.

And she is confident her dad would be “proud of the person” she is for what she’s done to grow following his death and “not let my story and my loss take over me.”

“I think once I figured out how to do that, that feeling of feeling like I was just ‘the kid with the dead dad from 9/11’ kind of dissipated,” she says.

“I turned my pain into a purpose by doing what I do and finding a way to give back and help people,” she adds. “And that’s who my dad was as a person. And I think the biggest thing for me is I have now lived these 25 years honoring him the best way I know how.”

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