Katie Couric co-hosted the Today Show for over a decade. She has since moved on to many other career opportunities but is beloved by NBC viewers. The news anchor got candid about the heartbreak of missing milestones with her two daughters. Keep reading for the full story.
Katie Couric Opens Up About ‘Missed Milestones’
Katie Couric’s time on the Today Show is sometimes overshadowed by what we know now about her co-host, Matt Lauer’s, alleged disturbing behavior. She left the morning program in 2006 after 15 years. The View host Meredith Vieira replaced her.
After leaving the Today Show, Katie Couric became the first female solo anchor of CBS Evening News. She left that job after five years to host her own daytime talk show. The anchor then moved to Yahoo before starting her own production company, where she creates content for her YouTube channel and other social media.
Her stellar career aside, Katie Couric is the mother of two daughters. During a recent fundraising event, she opened up about the “missed milestones” of their lives. However, she wasn’t talking about herself. She was talking about the milestones her late husband missed.
Jay Monahan died in 1998 after a battle with colon cancer. He was only 42. “You know, my husband missed so many milestones with our daughters. They were just 6 and 2 when Jay died, so he missed so much. He missed watching them grow into these incredible young women,” she told PEOPLE magazine at the event.
The Today Show anchor added, “He missed proms and parent-teacher conferences and college acceptances and graduations and weddings — at least Ellie, not Carrie yet — and the birth of, of a grandson, now Jay, who is 2, named after [him].”
Katie Couric almost missed some important milestones in her children’s lives, too. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2022. Luckily, it was in the early stages and she was able to beat it.
Today Alum Shares Why ‘Priceless’ Moments
Katie Couric was only married to her first husband for nine years. She remarried in 2014. However, her first husband remains close to her heart and always on her mind. Since his death and her own cancer scare, Katie Couric has made it her mission to raise awareness about early testing.
“To think that some of these families aren’t gonna miss those moments and are going to be intact and are gonna be able to love and support each other,” she said at the Runway for Recovery fundraiser this week.
“The fact that I did something that made it possible for them versus the alternative, as they say in the MasterCard commercial, that’s priceless,” she added.
Katie Couric’s late husband missed out on some of their daughters’ milestones. But the Today host does everything she can to keep his memory alive.
Jennifer Havener grew up in a small town in Upstate New York. She earned her B.A in Writing & Literature from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. She always knew watching reality TV shows and soap operas, particularly ‘Days of Our Lives’, would come in handy someday. When she’s not writing, she’s playing with her dogs, Lola and Ruger
