Bode Miller is opening up about his heartbreaking loss. On the most recent episode of Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test Season 2, the Olympic alpine skier tells the other recruits about his 19-month-old daughter’s tragic death.
“I have a one-year-old girl and a 15-year-old girl and then five boys in between,” the father-of-eight explains. “My daughter would’ve been sandwiched right in between those — the one who passed away.”
In 2018, Miller’s young daughter, Emeline “Emmy” Miller, drowned after she “let herself out of the back door” and “jumped right into” the neighbor’s pool. According to a teary-eyed Miller, the aftermath was “brutal” and the pain “does not go away.”
“I would say grief is probably the most effective at screwing you up,” he says in his confessional. “When the worst possible thing you can imagine happens, you have to celebrate that you made it through. It’s wrong to say that you found a silver lining but you manage. You continue.”
The conversation sparks an emotional response from Kelly Rizzo, who was married to Full House star Bob Saget from 2018 until his shocking death in 2022.
“It’s such a weird thing that I never knew until you grieve is that you feel guilty for feeling happy,” she tells Miller. “Or even if you have a moment of happiness, you’re like, ‘Oh, my god. Am I gonna get judged for feeling happy? Like, I shouldn’t feel happy.'”
She adds, “I lost Bob last year and it has changed me in so many ways. To have gone through that trauma, it doesn’t really get worse than that.”
Later on, the recruits are faced with their next task: a backward dive into the freezing cold ocean in the “black of night.” While one would think this would be the course that would do Miller in, he bravely explains how his daughter’s death “helped” his relationship with water.
“I think I was ignorant and had not enough respect or not enough awareness or knowledge about it before. And now I think I have the fear and respect for it. But you have to know how to manage it,” he says. “I think talking to the kids about mental toughness or about grief is one thing, but to be able to show them is a different thing. My kids need to see it.”
Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test airs on Monday nights at 9/8c on Fox.