Savannah Guthrie on Grief and Learning to Sit With Loss

Savannah Guthrie is opening up about grief. In a message shared on Easter, she lamented the feelings of uncertainty that stem from the disappearance of her mother.

The Today co-anchor, 54, said in a video message for Good Shepherd New York church’s online Easter service, “For most of us, there will come a time in our life when these feelings hold sway.” She described the experience as “this grievous and uniquely cruel injury of not knowing, of uncertainty and confusion and answers withheld.”

Her mother, Nancy Guthrie, 84, was last seen at her home outside Tucson, Arizona, on Jan. 31. Authorities believe she was taken against her will. The case remains unresolved.

“We celebrate today the promise of a new life that never ends in death,” she said in the April 5 recording. “But standing here today, I have to tell you, there are moments in which that promise seems irretrievably far away, when life itself seems far harder than death.”

Guthrie, here in 2023, opened up about grief and uncertainty on Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026, in the wake of the disappearance of her mother.

Nathan Congleton/NBC via Getty Images

Guthrie spoke of living “in the mean time of feeling unsure, lost, abandoned, disappointed, enraged, forgotten.” 

AARP has tips for handling grief and loss, including naming and sharing your grief. Another tip is to follow and express your faith in ways that feel appropriate to you. Another way to cope with grief is to reestablish routines. While grief activates your “fight or flight” response, routines activate your “rest and digest” response. 

On Monday, a day after her Easter message, she returned to the Today show for the first time since late January. “Good morning, welcome to Today on this Monday morning,” she said. “We are so glad you started your week with us, and it is good to be home.”

She had already described what her return to the show might require. “I can’t come back and try to be something that I’m not,” she said in a March interview with former Today coanchor Hoda Kotb. “But I can’t not come back, because it’s my family. I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if I’ll belong anymore, but I would like to try.”

The uncertainty has been the hardest part: “We need answers. We cannot be at peace without knowing,” she told Kotb in the same interview.

The key takeaways were created with the assistance of generative AI. An AARP editor reviewed and refined the content for accuracy and clarity.