By Peter Sloggatt

A few days ago Meredith O'Neill was reading a note she recently received from Kristy Irvine Ryan. In it, Ryan told her best friend how much she was looking forward to the next chapter in their lives. O'Neill had served as Kristy's maid of honor when she married her high school sweetheart last June. And in September, Ryan was to serve as O'Neill's matron of honor.

"She said, 'I can't wait for this next portion of our lives,'" said O'Neill.

Now, two weeks after the terrorist attack in New York City, Meredith O'Neill is without the woman who she called "my other half." Kristy, a successful bond trader with an office on the 104th floor of tower two, was killed when the second hijacked plane slammed into the World Trade Center. She was 30 years old.

Ryan's was one of still untold thousands lost in the attack, and a memorial service held last Sunday afternoon at St. Patrick's Church was a reminder of just how far reaching the impact of those crashes were. Each of those lives touched countless others. In Kristy's case, there was a standing-room-only crowd of over 2,000 mourners.

"I was devastated by the amount of people at the service," said Kristy's father, Stuart. "She meant so much to so many people."

Kristy was cut down in her prime. At 30, she was vice president of equities at the bond trading firm Sandler O'Neill and Partners which Meredith's father, Thomas, founded. It was hard hit in the attack with 67 employees among the dead and missing. Kristy had taken a job there the September after she and Meredith graduated from the University of Dayton together.

"She was so good at what she did and she just loved it," said Meredith.

Her success and Wall Street contacts enabled Ryan to help O'Neill with a pet project that has blossomed into a non-profit corporation that aids underprivileged women. The charity, called Secret Smiles, helps women who are battered, impoverished, and just never had a chance. With financial donations, Secret Smiles would buy appliances, food, clothing, furniture and othernecessities, and deliver them anonymously to the recipients. Ryan, O'Neill and others involved in the charity never divulged the identities of the gift givers. It just appeared, said Ryan's father.

The project, originally planned to help the mom of one of the students at the Harlem school where O'Neill teaches kindergarten, has helped about 40 women, she said. Ironically, she and Kristy had plans to slow down because of their weddings. "We were going to take a break until after Christmas," said O'Neill. But with Kristy's death, the family's request that memorial donations be made to the charity has resulted in an outpouring that won't allow the charity to be put aside.

The charity work Kristy considered important brings some consolation to her family which has been devastated by the tragedy. Like many caught in the disaster, Kristy had been able to place some telephone calls after the first plane struck.

One of those calls was to her father. Stuart Irvine said he was working at home when she called and told him to turn on the television. She wanted him to know that the plane had struck the other tower, and she was safe. In the middle of the conversation, "she started crying and said, 'Dad, they're jumping out the windows. I've got to go.'" Kristy then called her husband who was home in their Greenwich Village apartment. She had time to say "I love you," before the second plane hit.

Although her family held out hope for some time Ñ they put missing posters up in Manhattan and checked the hospitals Ñ they soon began to plan her memorial.

Stuart Irvine, whose wife Toni was a well known art teacher in Huntington schools until her death eight years ago, said, "she beat me to being with her mother."

For Irvine, who said that Kristy was in many ways similar to his wife, the outpouring of support that the family has received since the tragedy repeats that which he received when Toni died of cancer eight years ago.

"All of the victims' families, we all feel what a wonderful town Huntington is. It's a shame that we learn it at a time of tragedy, but their support is overwhelming," he said.

The hardest part is understanding why. "I've run out of tears," he said. "Anger is setting in because you cannot accept this. I buried a wife that I loved for 35 years. You can accept illness. You can accept an accident. But this, if there was a reason to this I could accept it," said Irvine.

Still, he fears the reprisals that will result.

"I've talked with my four daughters, and they feel the same way, we do not want to see mass bombings. We don't want to hurt the Kristys of the world," he said.

In addition to her husband and father, Kristy is survived by her sisters Tracy,Kerry, Wendy and Michelle. Memorial donations in her name may be made to Secret Smiles, 332 Bleeker Street, PMB D38, New York, NY 10014.