Bode Miller’s wife Morgan is advocating for water safety months after the death of her daughter Emeline from drowning in a neighbor’s pool.
The Olympic alpine skier’s wife joined Nicole Hughes, who also lost her child from a drowning accident the same day, to discuss their tragic losses in an emotional interview on TODAY.
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“I’m so grateful that we’ve met and unfortunately, it’s on the worst of circumstances,” Morgan said, as first reported by PEOPLE. “Speaking to a mother who lost a child, you don’t need to explain it… We are sisters on a level that I pray no other women needs to find.”
News of Emeline’s death sent shockwaves June 10, with she and her husband going public after the tragic loss.
“Guilt is the most difficult thing,” Morgan told TODAY on Monday about the loss. “I hope and pray and beg that it gets easier.”
The grieving mother, who is pregnant with her third child, was having a playdate at a neighbor’s house in Coto de Caza, California, on June 9 with Emeline, their son Nash, 3, and Bode’s son Samuel, 5, while he went to his 10-year-old daughter Neesyn’s softball game.
Though they were inside at the time, Emeline slipped through a back door and fell in the water. She was in the pool for approximately 30 seconds before Morgan found her. Emergency responders from the Orange County Fire Department arrived but Emeline was ultimately unable to be resuscitated. She died the next day, June 10.
The same day, and on the other side of the country, Tennessee mom Hughes was on a family vacation in Fort Morgan, Alabama, with five other families — 12 adults and 17 children under the same roof.
Hughes was cleaning up while all the kids were watching TV. She remembers splitting a brownie, handing half of it to her son Levi and biting into the other half herself. She said she hadn’t even finished the brownie before she discovered Levi in the pool, TODAY reported.
“I have relived this, I have retraced my steps. What was I even doing? I don’t know,” she told the news program. “I put the brownie in my mouth, I didn’t sit down, I didn’t even have a conversation with anybody… No one was drinking, I wasn’t on my phone. I was just wiping up SpaghettiOs.”
There were several doctors in the vacation home, including Levi’s dad, but their efforts to save the boy’s life were not successful.
Though both mothers have suffered unimaginable pain, they’re choosing to channel their hurt toward increasing drowning safety education.
Morgan explained to TODAY that while drowning is always a concern, “the intensity behind the conversation” isn’t strong enough.
“It is 100 percent preventable,” she said. “You need to think of water completely differently. We’re sitting here and I’m looking outside at my pool and that is a lion. That is a kidnapper. That is something that can take my child in 30 seconds. And the moment those 30 seconds are up, the likelihood of you getting your child back is pretty close to zero.”
Both mothers hope to launch a campaign with the American Academy of Pediatrics that would help parents learn where and when drowning occurs, while urging doctors to make water safety conversations to be part of every pediatric checkup.
