Savannah Guthrie returned to the Today show anchor desk on Monday, appearing for the first time in over two months since her mother’s disappearance.
“Here we go, ready or not,” Guthrie said as the show opened. “Let’s do the news.”
Guthrie was surrounded by viewers wearing yellow ribbons in honour of her missing 84-year-old mother and holding signs that read, “Welcome back, Savannah.”
She also wore a yellow dress in honour of her mother and the flowers left at her mother’s home.
The morning show host, who has been a Today host since 2012, read the morning’s biggest headlines and said, “We are so glad that you started our week with us and it’s good to be home.”
Her co-host, Craig Melvin, who was wearing a yellow tie, said that “it’s good to have you back at home.”
Guthrie stepped away from her Today show role in early February after her mother Nancy Guthrie was reported missing on Feb. 1.
Authorities believe Nancy Guthrie was kidnapped, abducted or otherwise taken against her will after finding blood near the doorstep of her home in the foothills outside Tucson, Ariz. The FBI later released surveillance videos showing a masked man on the porch that night.
The Guthrie family has offered a US$1 million reward for information leading to the recovery of their mother.
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On Sunday, Guthrie said “I still believe” as she delivered an Easter video message at a New York church during service.
During her speech, Guthrie spoke about the struggles she faces as she continues to wrestle with the unknowns surrounding the disappearance of her mother.
Guthrie spoke about having moments of “deep disappointment with God” and “the feeling of utter abandonment.”
“Recently, though, in my own season of trial, I have wondered, I have questioned whether Jesus really ever experienced this particular wound that I feel,” she said. “This grievous and uniquely cruel injury of not knowing, of uncertainty and confusion and answers withheld.”
“In those darkest moments,” she continued, “I have thought bitterly, and perhaps irreverently, that I have stumbled upon a feeling that Jesus did not know.”
Guthrie noted that perhaps her message was “too dark a message to share on Easter morning” but said she has “long believed that we miss out on fully celebrating resurrection if we do not acknowledge the feelings of loss, pain, and, yes, death.”
“It is the darkness that makes this morning’s light so magnificent, so blindingly beautiful,” she added.
Guthrie told Hoda Kotb last month that she questioned if her mother’s disappearance was “because of me.”
In her first sit-down interview since Nancy’s disappearance, Guthrie recalled the moment she received a phone call from her sister Annie Guthrie, who told her that her mom was “missing,” during a segment of Kotb’s Today show interview.
“I said, ‘Is everything OK?’ And she said, ‘No, Mom’s missing.’ And I said, ‘What? What are you talking about?’ She said, ‘She’s gone.’ She was in a panic. I was in a panic,” Savannah told Kotb. “We thought that she must have had some kind of medical episode in the night, and that somehow the paramedics had come.”
Guthrie’s brother Charles Camron Guthrie, whom she described as “brilliant” with a military background, was the first to suggest that their mom was kidnapped for ransom.
“Do you think because of me?” Guthrie recalled saying to her brother. “And he said, ‘I’m sorry, sweetie, but yeah, maybe.’ But I knew that. We still don’t know, honestly, we don’t know anything.
“But it’s because she’s my mom, and somebody thought, ‘Oh, that girl, that lady, has money, we can make a quick buck.’ I mean, that would make sense, but we don’t know, which is too much to bear, to think that I brought this to her bedside. That it’s because of me. And I just say ‘I’m so sorry, Mommy.’
“I’m sorry to my sister and my brother and my kids and my nephew and Tommy, my brother-in-law,” a tearful Guthrie said.
The Today show host had said her family is in “agony” as the search for her mother continues.
Guthrie said “someone needs to do the right thing” and come forward with information to help the investigation.
“We are in agony. It is unbearable and to think of what she went through,” a tearful Savannah said in a portion of her first interview shared on the Today show last month.
“I wake up every night in the middle of the night and in the darkness I imagine her terror and it is unthinkable but those thoughts demand to be thought,” Guthrie said. “And I will not hide my face. But she needs to come home now.”
— with files from The Associated Press
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