Chrissy Teigen opened up on TODAY Tuesday about how she has been coping with the loss of her baby son, Jack, who died last year.
The cookbook author, 35, told Hoda Kotb that it took her a while to begin working through her grief.
“To not have really processed that, to really explain that to your children, what happened, and to have to explain it to yourself,” she said. “Because a lot of it, I threw myself into the cookbook instead of processing it.”
Teigen also revealed on TODAY that she was celebrating 100 days of sobriety and she said giving up drinking has been crucial when it comes to facing her painful emotions.
“It took a lot of therapy,” she said. “I needed to be clear. That’s why honestly, going sober was so important. I needed to be clear-headed, I needed to be able to understand what I was taking in in therapy and really absorb it, instead of just hiding behind alcohol.”
Jack died in September 2020 after Teigen suffered a pregnancy loss at 20 weeks.
During another visit to TODAY with Hoda & Jenna on Tuesday, Teigen opened up about how her kids, daughter Luna, 5, and son Miles, 3, are processing the loss of their late brother.
“Talking to the kids about it is really magical because my mother obviously lives with us and she brings in that old-school Thai sensibility of, 'They're always around us. They're in the air. They're in the sky.' We have his ashes next to my bed, and my kids — we joke about it, but when we go on vacation and things, they’re like, ‘Don't forget Jack,’” she said. “And we'll pack him up and we bring him and one day, we'll release him.”
She added that having Jack’s ashes at home “really helped explain death" to her kids.
“It was kind of confusing to tell them, like, what had happened in the hospital,” she said. “But once they saw the ashes, they realized, ‘Oh, this happened, you know, he's not coming back.’ … It became very real to them, and they draw him in school and things.”
Teigen also said that after a very difficult year, she is “in a good place” and is finding renewed joy in “doing normal things” with her family.
“You look back and you realize the things you weren't doing,” she said. “I wasn't driving myself … it's the little things, like, I will sing in the shower again, or I can jump out of bed now, I can go down the stairs without holding the handrail."
She continued, “I was really in such a hole for so long that now, just doing anything — picking up the kids from school, riding the bike with them … and just being on the floor with them and rolling around and genuinely hearing them laugh and be excited that Mommy is whole again — I think is really good.”
In her earlier interview with Hoda, Teigen also addressed her cyberbullying controversy that made headlines over the summer, when TV personality Courtney Stodden and others accused Teigen of targeting them in the past with hurtful comments on social media.
Teigen issued a lengthy apology for her actions in June, saying she was “a troll, full stop.”
"I think you learn so much in the moments where you do lose so much, you lose it all, your world is kind of turned upside down," she told Hoda of her journey since then. "For me it was a big moment of, 'Wow, I need to find out how I can be better, how I can grow from this, learn from this.' ... Truly, it made me a stronger person, a better person.”