NEED TO KNOW
- Emilie and Brady Kiser’s 3-year-old son, Trigg, died in May after he drowned in the family’s backyard pool
- In the months since, Emilie has opened up about how she handled her grief journey, and shared on Monday, Oct. 27 that she recently attended a grief retreat
- She shared she learned that “grief isn’t the enemy,” but rather a companion. “It’s a reminder of your loved one every single day,” she said
Emilie Kiser continues to open up about her grief journey, five months after the death of her 3-year-old son Trigg in May.
The Arizona-based influencer told followers that she recently attended a grief retreat in a video published to her Instagram and TikTok accounts on Monday, Oct. 27.
Kiser attended a similar retreat “right after” Trigg’s tragic death, she said, but at this most recent retreat, Kiser says that she learned meditation techniques, new insights from a two-hour counseling session and a different interpretation of the five stages of grief.
During the meditation, she was asked to “come face-to-face” with her grief, Kiser explained. Once she entered a meditative state, she was instructed to go to a happy place, where she envisioned herself with Trigg.
Kiser was then told to talk to and identify her grief, from its color to giving it a name. She chose to name her grief, “Hard,” adding, “I could feel myself just saying, ‘I don’t want you here. I never wanted you here, like I want you to go away.’ ”
Emilie Kiser in Oct. 27, 2025 Instagram.
Emilie Kiser/Instagram
“But through this experience, we were able to see that the grief doesn’t want to be there either. It didn’t ask to be in our lives,” she continued. The influencer explained that she has to learn to work together with her grief “because it is going to be here forever, and it’s going to be here for the rest of your life.”
The content creator said she learned “grief equals love,” and she’s learning how to look at the emotion as a friend.
“Grief is all of the love that you have for that person,” she said, adding that it “becoming your friend is just so helpful.”
“I feel like I was able to see that grief isn’t the enemy, I guess it’s a companion. It’s a reminder of your loved one every single day.”
If her grief disappeared tomorrow, she would be sad, because it would mean that she isn’t thinking about Trigg “all the time and every day,” she said.
Emilie, Brady and Trigg Kiser.
emiliekiser/Instagram
During a two-hour counseling session, Kiser said she learned that it is common for parents who lose a child that they “feel guilty for a lot of the emotions” they will have as they grieve.
“A lot of times it’s hard after you lose a loved one to have a happy moment, because you take a step back, or you start to overthink it. You’re like, ‘Why do I feel happy right now? How can I possibly feel happy right now?’ If I’m having a happy moment, I’ll start to feel guilty that I’m happy.”
Her counselor told her that she still deserves to be happy again. “Everything can coexist,” and she can feel happiness without negating her grief, Kiser recalled her counselor saying.
“It’s okay to just feel happy and not feel guilty because you’re happy or not feel sad because you’re happy,” she said. “It’s also okay to just feel that one emotion and be okay and at peace with feeling.”
Her final insight from her retreat counselor that she wanted to share with others who are grieving a loved one is that “the Stages of Grief are B.S.”
“They were designed for people who were elderly and at the end stages of their lives. They were not designed for child loss or losing a parent or losing a sibling,” she said. “So anybody who tells you that you are supposed to feel a certain way at a certain time in your grief journey, or that you’re skipping stages, or anything like that, literally not true. Do not listen to them.”
Kiser explained that her counselor told her that the five stages of (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance) will be persistent and follow “the waves and emotions for the rest of life with grief.”
As she concluded, the video said there are “so many misunderstandings and misconceptions and everything about grief,” and she hopes her video can help someone as they grieve a loved one.
Trigg died in a May drowning accident in the family’s backyard pool.
Kiser later filed a lawsuit to keep records about her son’s death out of public view. The Arizona Superior Court for Maricopa County ruled in the influencer’s favor on a separate motion she filed to keep her personal declaration private.
In August, the same court ruled in favor of Kiser’s filing to remove the two pages of the Chandler Police Department’s police report that included recommendations for her husband Brady to be charged with a class 4 felony of child abuse after the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office announced that there was “no likelihood of conviction” against Brady.
Brady was the only parent home at the time of the drowning. He initially said that he had lost sight of Trigg for three to five minutes before finding him in the pool, though a report by the CPD later cited video evidence that Trigg “was in the backyard unsupervised for more than nine minutes, and in the water for about seven of those minutes.”
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Kiser returned to social media on Aug. 28 with her first public statement since her son’s death. “I’ve spent days, weeks, months trying to find them [the right words] and also take the time I’ve needed to digest the loss of my baby,” she wrote.
In the months since her return to social media, she has opened up about her grief, candidly admitting in a Sept. 20 post that she was “really nervous” to begin posting online again. She has since thanked mental health professionals for their strength and opened up about her personal treatment plan.
