Empathy Over Blame: How One Couple Found Forgiveness After Unimaginable Loss

When tragedy strikes in an instant, marriages can crumble under the weight of grief and blame. But Emilie Kiser chose a different path—one that required her to confront her own capacity for compassion even in the darkest moment of her life.

Their eldest son, Trigg, died at age 3 in May 2025 after being found unconscious in the family’s pool. Brady Kiser, her husband, was the only adult home at the time. In those first raw days and weeks, Emilie admits she felt a rage she wasn’t sure she could ever move past.“I was just—I mean from the beginning—felt so angry at him of literally,‘I don’t know if I will ever forgive this man,'”she shared on the June 17 episode of Jay Shetty’s“On Purpose”podcast.

But something shifted. While Brady was caring for their newborn son Teddy—de-thawing Emilie’s breast milk and trying to get him settled—the accident happened. That detail mattered. It reframed everything. Emilie realized that she could have been in that exact position. Under the same circumstances, with the same split-second inattention that can happen to any parent, it could have been her. That realization didn’t erase what happened or excuse the series of events that followed, but it fundamentally changed how she understood her husband’s culpability—and her own capacity to forgive.

“Even if I got to a point where I could not stay married to him,”she explained,“I would be able to forgive him because I would so deeply want him to forgive me and to know that I didn’t mean for it to happen.”That’s the theology of grace applied to the hardest moments: treating others the way we’d hope to be treated if our worst fears came true.

Throughout the podcast interview, Emilie praised Brady for letting her feel every emotion without judgment—anger, resentment, despair—and never making her feel ashamed of them. He was grieving too, navigating the same incomprehensible loss. They became the only two people who could truly understand what the other was enduring.“I’m really proud of us, honestly, and how we’ve grieved together,”she said.

This isn’t a story about getting over tragedy quickly or easily. It’s about two people choosing to grieve in tandem instead of turning on each other—and about the radical empathy required to see your spouse’s suffering as equal to your own, even when every instinct screams for someone to blame.