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More than a year after influencer Emilie Kiser lost her 3-year-old son, Trigg, in a tragic drowning accident, she’s opening up in an interview for the very first time. This week, Emilie appeared on Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast, where she spoke about the incident that took place while her husband, Brady, was watching their two children, and how she finally managed to forgive him for his role in Trigg’s death.
Emilie was out to dinner with friends when the accident occurred, five weeks after she’d welcomed her second baby, Teddy.
“About maybe 10 minutes after I arrived, I got a phone call from my husband that our son, Trigg, had fallen in the pool, and that he wasn’t breathing,” Emilie recounted on the podcast. “I could hear the pain and just confusion in his voice. I knew immediately, before he even said anything, that something was wrong. And so I rushed to the hospital to be by my son’s side, and our life just completely changed that day. He passed away about a week later, and our whole world fell apart.”
Brady had been responsible for both kids while Emilie was out with her friends, and while losing sight of Trigg for just a few minutes, he ended up outside and in the family’s pool, where his dad found him moments later.
At first, she wasn’t sure if she could forgive Brady.
She admitted that at first, she was “so angry” with Brady, as anyone would be — her son drowned on his watch, even though it was an accident. She wasn’t sure that she’d ever be able to forgive him or that their marriage would be able to survive such a huge tragedy.
Emilie added that Brady has allowed her to feel all those feelings as they’ve both tried to heal together.
“He has allowed me to take out every emotion I’ve had throughout this process, whether it’s on him or talking to him or with other people, and I just have so much respect for that, of how much he has just let me feel every emotion, and he’s never made me feel bad for it,” she said. “He’s going through so much as well, and like I said, we are the only two people that can understand at all what the other person is going through.”
Now, she’s “proud” of how far they’ve come.
Ultimately, she realized that she could forgive Brady because it was an accident that could have just as easily have happened to her while juggling a toddler and a newborn on her own.
“It doesn’t excuse what happened. It doesn’t excuse any of the series of events after that,” she said. “But taking that accountability along with all the other things I know I could have changed gave me so much true, deep, real raw empathy for him of this could have been me.”
More than a year after Trigg’s death, Emilie said that she’s “really proud” of herself and Brady putting in the work to move forward together.
“Through all the therapy we’ve done, I feel like we’ve really been given tools that, even though our grief is so separate, we have really done our best to come together,” she said.
This is an unimaginably sad situation for Emilie and her family, but it sounds like they’re finding a path through.
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