Veteran journalist Richard Cohen, who has been married to Meredith Vieira since 1986, died on Christmas Eve at the age of 76.
Cohen lived more than 50 years with multiple sclerosis and survived two cancer diagnoses.
Hoda Kotb announced his death on “Today” Tuesday. The host said Cohen was “surrounded by his family and love” at the time of his passing, including Vieira, 71, and their three kids: daughter Lily, 32, and sons Gabriel 34, and Benjamin, 36.
The family had been together since Thanksgiving, as Kotb noted they were “concerned they were going to lose him early. Instead, they got a glorious month with their dad.”
“She’s in really good spirits,” Savannah Guthrie added of her fellow “Today” anchor. “She was such a beautiful and devoted wife to Richard and he adored Meredith. And hanging out with them, they were like the most fun and entertaining, irreverent, cool couple you could hang out with.”
The couple was married for 38 years, with Cohen being diagnosed at the age of 25 with MS, He told Vieira that he had the chronic disease on their second date.
“I told her about the illness, because I sort of learned the hard way to get it on the table,” Cohen recalled to Yahoo Life in 2019. “And she really didn’t blink.”
“I’ve always been of the school of thought that you could get hit by a bus the next day, any one of us could,” Vieira chimed in. “It certainly wasn’t enough to scare me off.”
The television personality stood by her husband’s side over almost four decades together, and was there when he decided to step back from his extensive reporting career for CBS News and became an advocate for people with MS.
Speaking about how the pair deals with the chronic disease – which affects the central nervous system, including the brain, spinal cord and optic nerves – Vieira told People in 2018: “We definitely allow each other to vent.
“That’s part of the deal. Certainly he’s allowed to vent, because he’s got chronic illness. But I am too. Because there are days I can’t stand it and the limitations it puts on the entire family. It’s good to say it. But we don’t dwell.”
She added: “You can think, ‘Why us?’ but then it’s like, ‘Why not us?’ So many people are dealing with stuff and it puts it into perspective.”
Vieira also had a long career in broadcast, first as an original co-host on “The View.” But in 2006, she stepped away from the daytime talk show co-anchor “Today.”
Then, in 2011, Vieira retired to spend more time with Cohen, who became legally blind at the end of his life, and their children.
“Time is one of those weird things,” she revealed on air. “You can never get enough of it, and it just keeps ticking away. And I know that I want to spend more of mine with my husband, Richard, and my kids.”
In addition to living with MS, Cohen survived colon cancer twice and a blood clot in his lung.
Cohen opened up about the impact MS had on his loved ones in his 2018 memoir “Chasing Hope: A Patient’s Deep Dive into Stem Cells, Faith, and the Future.”
“Chronic illness is a family affair. Spouses have the burden of tending to the needs of a loved one, even when they would secretly rather push him out a window,” he penned. “I knew they should not be treated as spectators when they are in the ring with us.”
