Savannah Guthrie confided in Brooke Shields about her ongoing mourning process following the heart attack that took her father, Charles, when she was sixteen. The Today Show co-anchor appeared in the August 8th episode of Shields’ “Now What?” podcast for a poignant discussion.
Guthrie, 51, explained to Shields, 58, that her father had previously suffered his first heart attack when she was only a 13, and a freshman in high school. “I don’t think we understood how serious that was,” the broadcast journalist recalled. “And then three years later he had another heart attack, and that one was fatal. It was so unexpected.”
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Savannah Guthrie Remembers Her Late Father In Heartrending Episode Of Brooke Shields’ Podcast
The television personality then told the Pretty Baby alum that the untimely passing of her father was an event that fundamentally altered the direction of her life.
“I think it changes everything. I always think of it as on our calendars we have B.C. and A.D. There’s a before and after. It’s just this stark dividing line,” Guthrie shared. “There’s before my dad died and there’s after, and it’s profound. Grief is a lifelong process. I really believe that. There’s acute grief.”
The mom of two looked back at her grieving journey and added: “There’s different moments of grief, but I remember thinking even then when I was a late teenager, I always thought, I have a cup of grief now. It’s like a cup of water and I’m going to spend the rest of my life emptying this cup. And sometimes it’s coming out in buckets. And sometimes it’s a little sprinkle and sometimes I can just hold it and nothing comes out.”
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She went on, reflecting: “But every last drop of this cup will not be empty until I leave this world. I will always carry this grief. It doesn’t mean that I’m not happy, that I’m not joyous, but it’s part of me.”
On events such as Father’s Day and her 50th birthday, Guthrie honored her father’s memory on social media. Speaking to Shields, she mentioned that, after becoming a parent herself, she looked at the death of her father in a different light.
“When you lose a parent like that, so suddenly, it’s so shocking at 16, you just have some knowledge,” Guthrie continued. “You just know something about the world that hopefully others don’t have to know.”
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Guthrie added that while she isn’t certain if her father’s passing altered her attitude toward parenting or health, she does believe that his death steered her in a unique direction within her own life.
“I know it changed me and probably changed the whole trajectory of my life,” she noted. “I often think that I would have been totally different if my father had lived. I just don’t know that I would have chosen this career. I don’t know if I would have left home. I might’ve stayed in my hometown.”
Guthrie continued: “I don’t know what I would have done, but I know fundamentally it changed everything. And some things it changed for the better, in the sense of, I know that my heart is more tender because of it.”
In the comment sections of Guthrie’s tributes to her late dad, many of her Instagram followers have “thanked” her for sharing her story, as some found it to be “relatable” and “moving.”
