Emilie Kiser is opening up about her grief journey after losing her 3-year-old son, Trigg, earlier this year.
In a Monday, October 27, Instagram video, the influencer, 26, shared some of her takeaways from a recent “grief retreat,” describing techniques that have helped her grieve her son’s death. Trigg died in May after accidentally drowning in the family’s backyard pool in Chandler, Arizona.
“We were asked to try to visualize our grief — what it looked like, what color it was. We even gave our grief a name, and the name I gave mine was Hard,” Kiser said. “That was part of the meditation, talking to our grief. I feel like I could feel myself saying, ‘I don’t want you here. I never wanted you here. I want you to go away.’”
Through the visualization exercise, the influencer said she learned that she must coexist with her grief.
“Through this experience, we were able to see that the grief doesn’t wanna be there either. It didn’t ask to be in our lives,” she explained. “It was such an eye-opening experience to visualize grief. You have to work together with your grief because it is going to be here forever. So, looking at your grief as a friend and a companion … because grief equals love. Grief is all of the love that you have for that person. It becoming your friend is just so helpful.”
“I was able to see that grief isn’t the enemy … it’s a companion and it’s a reminder of your loved one every single day. If the grief were to disappear tomorrow, I would be sad, because it would mean that I don’t think about Trigg all the time and every day,” Kiser continued.
Kiser admitted that she has felt guilty about feeling “happy,” for which she received counseling during the grief retreat.
“You feel guilty for a lot of the emotions you have — at least I do — and a lot of the times it’s hard to have a happy moment, because you take a step back, or you start to overthink it, and you’re like, ‘Why do I feel happy right now?’” she said. “The counselor said to me, ‘You deserve to be happy again. You deserve to feel happiness. Just because you’re feeling those emotions, doesn’t mean you’re not grieving. Everything can coexist.’”
Finally, Kiser said that on the retreat, she learned that the well-known five stages of grief “are BS.”
“They were designed for people who were elderly and at the end stages of their life. They were not designed for child loss, losing a parent, or losing a sibling,” she said. “So anyone 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, literally not true, do not listen to them.”
Kiser described her feelings fluctuating between acceptance over her son’s death one week to experiencing anger the next week. She said these are the “waves and emotions for the rest of your life with grief.”
Kiser, who also shares 7-month-old son Teddy with husband Brady Kiser, previously broke her silence on Trigg’s death in an emotional Instagram post in August.
“Loss of this magnitude feels impossible to put into words,” she wrote at the time. “I’ve spent days, weeks, months trying to find them and also take the time I’ve needed to digest the loss of my baby.”
“I take full accountability as Trigg’s mother, and I know I should have done more to protect him,” she added. “One of the hardest lessons I carry is that a permanent pool fence could have saved his life, and it’s something I will never overlook again. I hope amidst this pain, Trigg’s story will help prevent other children and families from suffering the same loss.”
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