Savannah Guthrie’s Use of Past Tense Reveals Early Grieving for Missing Mother, Psychologist Says

A clinical psychologist has claimed Savannah Guthrie may have “already begun processing her mother Nancy Guthrie's absence,” after she referred to her in the past tense.

The Today co-host sat down with Hoda Kotb for her first interview since the disappearance of her 84-year-old mother.

Nancy Guthrie was reported missing from her Tucson home on February 1, after attending a family dinner the night before at the home of her daughter and son-in-law, Annie and Tommaso Cioni.

In the interview, Guthrie said this was not a situation where her mother could have simply wandered off, noting that she “can’t wander off.”

“My mom was in tremendous pain. Her back was very bad. On a good day, she could walk down to the mailbox and get the mail. But most days, not,” she said.

“When someone shifts to past tense while speaking about a person who is still officially missing, it rarely happens consciously — and that’s exactly what makes it significant,” Dr. Kelly Gonderman told Daily Express US.

“Language reflects the internal model we’ve already constructed, even when we haven’t articulated it out loud.”

Guthrie added: “We thought that she must have had some kind of medical episode in the night and that somehow the paramedics had come because the back doors were propped open. And that didn’t make any sense.”

She continued, “We thought maybe they came and there was a stretcher and they took her out the back. But her phone was there and her purse was there and all her things. Annie and Tommaso had already called all the hospitals, but then I told them, ‘I’m going to call the hospitals.’ It was just chaos and disbelief.”

Dr. Gonderman said Savannah’s use of the past tense “suggested her psyche had already begun processing an absence.”

The expert added this does not necessarily mean Guthrie “knows something definitively,” but that “sustained uncertainty at that level of fear eventually forces the mind to begin grieving in order to survive it.”

Dr. Gonderman noted that Savannah may be experiencing “anticipatory grief,” in which the “nervous system initiates before the person is ready to consciously acknowledge it.”

She added that the brain does this to protect itself “by beginning to accept what it most fears, even in the absence of confirmation”—and that Guthrie’s use of the past tense may offer “a window into how profound the private experience of this has been.”