Hoda Kotb is showing support as Savannah Guthrie officially makes her return to the Today show.
“With you xoxo,” Kotb, 61, captioned an Instagram post on Monday, April 6, sharing a photo of Guthrie, 54, with her kids.
The message came as Savannah began her first broadcast back on the Today show in two months after her mother, Nancy Guthrie, was reported missing in Arizona in February. Savannah took time away from her role on NBC as authorities investigated Nancy’s disappearance.
Kotb filled in for Savannah during her time away from the show, sitting down with her former colleague last month for an emotional conversation about Nancy’s case.
“When I look at the Today show, it’s the answer to all of my dreams, actually better than my dreams,” Savannah said. “It’s hard to imagine doing it because it’s such a place of joy and lightness. I can’t come back and try to be something that I’m not. But I can’t not come back because it’s my family. I think it’s part of my purpose right now. I want to smile, and when I do, it will be real. And my joy will be my protest. My joy will be my answer.”
She continued, “Being there is joyful. And when it’s not, I’ll say so. And I have been so grateful to have this family, I consider this my family, my greater family, and when times are hard, you want to be with your family. And I want to be with my family. And so I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if I’ll belong anymore. But I would like to try.”
Authorities have yet to identify a suspect amid Nancy’s disappearance, but the FBI previously shared footage of a masked person outside of her home.
“We are in agony. … It is unbearable,” Savannah said in her interview. “And to think of what she went through. I wake up every night in the middle of the night. Every night. And in the darkness, I imagine her terror. And it is unthinkable.”
One day before her Today show return, Savannah shared a thoughtful message in honor of Easter.
“We celebrate today the promise of a new life that never ends in death,” she said while attending Good Shepherd New York’s virtual Easter service on Sunday, April 5. “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. These moments of deep disappointment with God, the feeling of utter abandonment for most of us, there will come a time in our life when these feelings hold sway.”
Savannah admitted that she “questioned whether Jesus really ever experienced this particular wound that I feel — this grievous and uniquely cruel injury of not knowing, of uncertainty and confusion and answers withheld in those darkest moments.” She also wondered whether her thoughts were “too dark a message to share on Easter morning.”
“But I have long believed that we miss out on fully celebrating resurrection if we do not acknowledge the feelings of loss, pain, and yes, death,” she added. “It is the darkness that makes this morning’s light so magnificent, so blindly beautiful. It is all the brighter because it is so desperately needed.”
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