Grief Doesn't Follow a Timeline: What Emilie Kiser Wants You to Know

When Emilie Kiser’s son Trigg died at age 3 after being found unconscious in the family pool in May 2025, she faced an impossible task: how to keep living while carrying the weight of that loss. More than a year later, the influencer continues to share her grief journey with raw honesty, challenging the conventional wisdom we’ve all heard about how people are supposed to heal.

The turning point came when Kiser attended a grief retreat that fundamentally rewired how she understood loss. She discovered that the widely cited“five stages of grief”— denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — were never designed with child loss in mind, and frankly, weren’t working for her. Instead of fighting grief like it’s an enemy to defeat, she learned to coexist with it. The pain, she’s come to understand, doesn’t disappear in waves you overcome. It’s something you learn to live with, moment by moment, day by day.

In a June 2026 episode of the“On Purpose”podcast, Kiser was clear about her mission moving forward: she doesn’t want Trigg to become the tragedy people avoid mentioning. She and her husband Brady decided early on that their younger son, Theodore“Teddy,”born in March 2025, would grow up in a world where Trigg’s memory is honored through conversation, not silence.“I never want a world where people don’t talk about him,”she said. That commitment to remembrance, even when it’s difficult, feels like its own kind of strength.

What strikes most about Kiser’s openness is her refusal to perform recovery. In an October 2025 Instagram post, she told other grieving parents:“It’s a never ending feeling of sadness.”But then she reframed that permanence as something meaningful.“If my grief went away tomorrow, I would be sad. Because it would mean I’m not forever living with the memories of and feelings of loving him and missing him.”That’s not resignation. That’s choosing to keep loving someone you’ve lost.

By April 2026, Kiser had also begun working through the harder question of how to rebuild a marriage after such trauma. Her answer was equally unflinching: therapy, consistency, and the recognition that“everyone deserves love, empathy, and forgiveness.”She’s learned to tune out judgment and focus on what actually matters — moving forward, not moving on.

Trigg’s death was an accident. The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office determined there was no basis for criminal charges despite initial recommendations. But for Kiser, one lesson became non-negotiable: a pool fence could have saved her son’s life. That specificity, that accountability, is how she’s transforming private anguish into public awareness. Her grief isn’t inspiration porn or a redemption arc. It’s the messy, ongoing work of loving someone who’s gone while still showing up for the people who remain.