Emilie Kiser is defending her choice not to publicly discuss the death of her 3-year-old son, Trigg, earlier this year.
The influencer, 26, shared her feelings via TikTok on Monday, October 13, talking in-depth about losing Trigg for the first time since he drowned in May.
Kiser told her followers that “unless you have lost someone and gone through grief, you will not understand what you would do or how you would act. Because you just have never had to be in that position, and I hope you never have to be.”
With tears in her eyes, she continued, “I mean, everybody loses someone or something at some point in their lives, but losing a child is literally the worst pain. And I would not want anybody to go through it.”
Kiser said she is hurt by critics who think she hasn’t grieved properly or opened up enough on the tragedy.
“For people to say, ‘If this were me, I would just be crippled and I would be thinking about them all day and I wouldn’t be able to continue on,’ do you not think that everywhere I look in my house, I don’t see my child?” she said. “His photos are everywhere. His artwork is everywhere. … I love that because he’s my child and I never want to forget him. But I’m not showing that on camera. I’m not showing you all those things.”
She explained that she wasn’t “sharing my kids anymore, therefore I’m not sharing Teddy and I’m not sharing Trigg. I’m doing my best and I’m sharing a very small portion because I’m not ready to share other things. I’m not ready to talk about other things. And that is OK. Those are the things I am unpacking in my therapy sessions and with professionals and with my family.” (She and husband Brady Kiser also share son Teddy, who was born in March.)
Kiser added: “And those are not things that I think I should be coming on the internet and unpacking with millions of people.”
While she feels “ready to return to work in some sense of normalcy, I am not ready to talk about anything about what happened to him,” she said, tearfully adding, “Very much processing the loss of my son.”
Kiser added that people are “entitled to say what they want about my grief journey,” but reminded them that they’re “not seeing the full scope of things. I am sharing the moments that I can bear to film and that I want to film, because it kind of helps me step out of my reality for a second, and do my job, which I very much enjoy. I genuinely enjoy content creation. That’s why I do it.”
The Chandler, Arizona, Police Department confirmed to Us Weekly in May that Trigg died after being pulled unconscious from the family’s backyard pool. In July, authorities submitted a criminal charge recommendation for Trigg’s father, Brady, who was home when the incident occurred. A statement shared by the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office later said there was “no likelihood of conviction.”
After taking a break from social media in the aftermath of Trigg’s death, Kiser broke her silence in August.
“Loss of this magnitude feels impossible to put into words,” she wrote via Instagram 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.”
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