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TV Broadcaster Meredith Vieira’s Husband Richard Cohen Dead at 76 After 50-Year MS Battle
Respected journalist Richard Cohen died at the age 76 on Christmas Eve surrounded by his family and wife, Meredith Vieira. He battled pneumonia for two months before his death and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis over 50 years ago.
Today show cohosts Hoda Kotb and Savannah Guthrie announced the news during the Tuesday, January 7, episode of the show. Hoda, 60, explained that Richard and Meredith’s kids Benjamin, 36, Gabriel, 34, and Lily, 32, gathered together for Thanksgiving, “concerned” that it would be their last holiday as a family.
“Instead, they got a glorious month with their dad,” Hoda, who is retiring after her final Today episode on Friday, January 10, said.
Savannah, 53, updated fans on Meredith’s well-being, sharing good news that the former Today show host is in “really good spirits.”
“She was such a beautiful and devoted wife to Richard and he adored Meredith,” Samantha said. “And hanging out with them, they were like the most fun and entertaining, irreverent, cool couple you could hang out with.”
Richard and Meredith, 71, lived a life full of love after they met in 1982 and tied the knot four years later. The couple faced challenges head-on early in their relationship when the former Washington Post columnist told Meredith he had MS, a long-lasting chronic disease of the central nervous system, on their second date.
“I told her about the illness, because I sort of learned the hard way to get it on the table,” Richard told Yahoo! Life in 2019, revealing that Meredith “really didn’t blink” while receiving the news.
Later in the interview, Meredith admitted that Richard’s health condition “certainly wasn’t enough to scare me off.”
Richard told the outlet about the moment he realized he had MS, a diease which ran in his family.
“I dropped a coffeepot for no reason. I fell off a curb for no reason. I noticed a little numbness in my leg,” Richard reflected. “It hit my eyesight fairly quickly, but other than that, I was very active physically and I thought I was really beating it. I was living in denial.”
In addition to Richard’s longtime MS diagnosis, he also fought colon cancer twice in 1999 and 2000. The former reporter also suffered a life-threatening blood clot in his lungs and was declared legally blind.
Meredith retired in 2011 and hosted her final broadcast before dedicating her time to Richard and their children.
“Time is one of those weird things,” she said during her final farewell. “You can never get enough of it, and it just keeps ticking away.”
In 2018, Richard released his memoir, Chasing Hope: A Patient’s Deep Dive into Stem Cells, Faith, and the Future, which “navigates the fascinating and ever-changing intersection between illness and hope.”
In the book, Richard shared the hardships that not only he faced battling MS since age 25 – but the struggles his family faced, too.
“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 wrote. “I knew they should not be treated as spectators when they are in the ring with us.”
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