Savannah Guthrie is opening up about how she continues to mourn the loss of her father, Charles, who died from a heart attack when she was 16.
He suffered his first heart attack when she was 13 and a freshman in high school, she told Brooke Shields on the Aug. 8 episode of her “Now What?” podcast.
“I don’t think we understood how serious that was,” she said. “And then three years later he had another heart attack, and that one was fatal. It was so unexpected.”
Savannah said her father’s death was a pivotal moment that changed the course 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,” she said. “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.
“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. 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.”
Savannah has paid tribute to her dad on occasions like Father’s Day and her 50th birthday. She told Shields that after she became parent herself, the death of a parent brings with it wisdom that alters who you are.
“When you lose a parent like that, so suddenly, it’s so shocking at 16, you just have some knowledge,” she said. “You just know something about the world that hopefully others don’t have to know.”
Savannah said she is unsure if her father’s death changed how she looks at parenting or health, but she feels his death set her on a different path in her own life.
“I know it changed me and probably changed the whole trajectory of my life,” she said. “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.
“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.”
