Special Forces tests participants’ physical abilities, but Bode Miller learned that some tasks would test his emotions as well.
In Us Weekly’s exclusive clip of the Monday, October 9, episode, Miller, 45, had to complete a backwards free fall into ice-cold water. In a confessional interview, he admitted that the challenge had extra resonance for him because of his daughter Emmy, who accidentally drowned in June 2018 when she was 19 months old.
“I would say losing Emmy probably helped my relationship with water,” Miller told the camera. “I think I was ignorant and had not enough respect or not enough awareness and knowledge about it before. And now I think I have fear and respect for it, but you have to know how to manage it.”
Bode shared Emmy with wife Morgan Miller, whom he wed in 2012. The couple are the parents of sons Edward, 8, and Easton, 5, twin boys Asher and Aksel, 3, and daughter Scarlet, 22 months. Bode also shares daughter Neesyn, 15, with Chanel Johnson and son Samuel, 10, with Sara McKenna.
Bode and Morgan, 36, welcomed Emmy in November 2016. Less than two years later, Emmy died after falling into a neighbor’s pool and drowning. “I opened the door, and she was floating facedown in the pool,” Morgan recalled in an August 2021 interview with CBS This Morning. “I jumped in, and I pulled her out. And I started CPR … Every time I close my eyes at night to go to sleep, it replays in my head. It happens so fast.”
After Emmy’s death, Bode encouraged other parents to take water safety seriously and look at their family as an example of what can happen. “Once it becomes something that everyone is aware of, we can really prevent these kinds of tragedies,” he explained in the same interview. “At the end of the day, what happened to us is horrible for us, and I think a lot of people shared our pain in that. But we want to make it not happen for other people.”
Earlier this year, Morgan reflected on Emmy’s passing while watching her other daughter, Scarlet, learn to swim.
“Watching Scarlet swim today made me realize it’s been months where I have been running from the debilitating pain of losing a child … that gut punch that makes it hard to breathe. I’ve gone dark. I’ve refused to cry. I’ve just wanted to be numb,” she wrote via Instagram in May. “But watching her swim today also made me realize that this numbness doesn’t protect me from feeling the pain, it prevents me from feeling the joy … and without joy, what’s the point? So after many dark months, here’s to a scary leap of living fully, openly, and vulnerably and embracing the depths of the fundamental human experience of love and loss.”
Special Forces airs on Fox Mondays at 9 p.m. ET.
