“I can handle anything, God. I can handle anything, I just can’t handle not knowing,” Savannah Guthrie recalls praying early in her family’s horrifying ordeal of her mother disappearing.
“We can’t handle not knowing. I have to know.”
That’s when Guthrie says she “felt that I heard — one of the very few times in my life — I did hear God speak to me.”
“I heard a voice and it said, ‘You do know where she is. She’s with me. She’s with me.’”
Guthrie spoke with “Today” show guest host Hoda Kotb this week in her first interview since the disappearance of her mother, Nancy Guthrie, 54 days earlier on Feb. 1. In addition to expressing sorrow about the possibility she was the reason her mother was targeted, Guthrie spoke about how she and her siblings have survived the ordeal — emphasizing the centrality of their faith.
‘I know where she is’
“My faith is strong and resolute,” Guthrie told Kotb.
On a flight back to New York a month into the ordeal, she recalled grappling with the same uncertainty over where her mother was: “I looked out the window of the airplane and just thought, ‘Where are you?’”
After referencing the divine consolation she had received, Guthrie spoke about her mother. “Whether she’s on this Earth still, or whether she is in heaven, I know where she is. I know who she’s with.”
“But we need to know,” she quickly followed — reflecting how much that painful uncertainty continued to that moment.
That’s where the interview ends — with the video cutting back to her co-hosts. Al Roker hunches over with his face pressed to his hands. Craig Melvin sits with a stunned expression, and features anchor Carson Daly holds his hands up to his face.
Kotb sits in a reflective position, as she shares a first impression: “I mean, Savannah’s faith has been on display over the years, but never quite like that.”
“None of us have had much correspondence with her over this 54-day ordeal,” Daly says, explaining how it’s “hard to process here on live TV in the moment” what their team is “learning and unpacking” about their “dear friend.”
“What’s amazing is the very source of her pain is the very source of her faith,” Roker adds.
‘Unbearable’ pain, ‘unfathomable’ consolation
Roker was referring to another part of Guthrie’s interview, where she highlights several especially painful elements of the experience:
- The possibility her mother was targeted because of her feels “too much to bear.” Guthrie said, “I’m so sorry, Mommy. I’m so sorry. … If it is me, I’m so sorry.”
- The mental image of her mother being abducted that night is also painful — “the terror that she must have felt is unbearable. It’s unbearable.”
- The “cruel speculation” reflected in public rumors that someone in her family was involved. “It’s unbearable. And it piles pain upon pain. There are no words. There are no words. I don’t understand, I’ll never understand.”
Yet after acknowledging so openly this staggering amount of pain, Guthrie doesn’t end there. “I felt terrible grief and I felt unfathomable love and comfort.”
After a long pause, she added, “The good news and kindness of God is remarkable and in equal measure to my sorrow.”
Strength gained from Mom
Guthrie makes a point in the interview to detail more about how she learned to respond to such aching tragedy with so much grace.
She recollects coming home on a Friday night as a 16-year-old girl to find her mother and newly graduated sister “on the couch praying.”
That’s when she learned her 49-year-old father Charles had died of a heart attack while on a work trip in Mexico. Guthrie described this moment in her 2024 book, “Mostly What God Does,” as when “the world broke open.”
“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in,” Guthrie quoted Leonard Cohen as saying.
A faith that had been “polite and inherited” prior to her father’s death became a “lifeline” afterward and forged in the “fire” of heartache.
“I didn’t just believe in God anymore; I needed him,” she wrote.
So did her 46-year-old mother, now the sole provider for three children, who had never worked outside the home. Guthrie described in the interview watching her mother at that time “survive the unimaginable.”
In the days after her father’s death, Guthrie remembers how her mother “stayed strong for us. She was resolute.”
But she was also real in her aching grief, Guthrie recalls. “I remember moments in my childhood and those days after my dad died. … She was so strong, but some mornings before dawn, when she thought we were still sleeping, I would hear her crying.”