Savannah Guthrie has returned to work, as the search for her mom continues.
The long-time Today host has been off work since February, when her 84-year-old mother, Nancy, went missing from her home in Tucson, Arizona, sparking a huge manhunt under the belief that she was kidnapped.
Now the 54-year-old is back at work after weeks of tearful appeals to her mother’s potential captor to bring her home.
“It is good to be home,” she said at the top of the show on Monday morning.
“It is good to have you back at home,” her co-host Craig Melvin said.
“Here we go, ready or not,” she said. “Let’s do the news.”
Despite having worked on the show since 2012, she has previously remarked on the impact the ordeal has had on her. In an interview with Today last week, she admitted that she didn’t know if she would feel like she belonged at the show when she came back.
“It’s hard to imagine doing it because it’s such a place of joy and lightness,” she said. “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.”
The show blends a mixture of hard news with lighter-hearted features, and Guthrie said she didn’t want to return to the show unless she was ready to mean it.
“I want to smile, and when I do, it will be real,” she told her stand-in, former Today host Hoda Kotb. “Being there is joyful, and when it’s not I’ll say so.”
Nancy herself has made cameos on the show over the years.
On the weekend, Guthrie released an emotional Easter message, saying, “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.”
One million dollars has been offered by the family for information on her whereabouts.
Cops are probing the possibility that a masked figure, spotted on doorcam footage, could have been involved in her disappearance. Blood was found on the doorstep of her home.
Meanwhile, the trail has gone cold, at last publicly, with no new updates from police in weeks, the Associated Press reports.
In late March, Guthrie issued a tearful plea on the Today show saying she and the rest of her family were in “agony.”
“Someone needs to do the right thing,” she said. “We are in agony. We are in agony. It is unbearable. And to think of what she went through.”
“I wake up every night in the middle of the night, every night,” she told Kotb. “And in the darkness, I imagine her terror. And it is unthinkable, but those thoughts demand to be thought. And I will not hide my face. But she needs to come home now.”
