Richard Cohen, veteran CBS News journalist and the husband of former Today cohost Meredith Vieira, has died after more than 50 years of battling multiple sclerosis.

The former senior producer passed away at 76 years old on Christmas Eve 2024, Hoda Kotb announced on Today on Tuesday, January 7. Hoda, 60, said that Richard was “surrounded by his family and love” from Meredith, 71, and their adult children — Lily, Gabriel and Benjamin.

Prior to Richard’s passing, his family had gathered together for Thanksgiving 2024. They were “concerned they were going to lose him early. Instead, they got a glorious month with their dad,” Hoda shared.

Cohost Savannah Guthrie added that Meredith is still “in really good spirits” despite losing her husband of 38 years.

“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,” she continued.

Richard lived with MS for much of his adult life, having received his diagnosis at 25 years old. He had already been familiar with the illness, as both his father and grandmother also had MS.

“It was already a family illness,” he explained to Yahoo Lifestyle in 2019.

Richard knew what to look out for and caught his symptoms before he was diagnosed. “I dropped a coffeepot for no reason. I fell off a curb for no reason,” he shared. “I noticed a little numbness in my leg. 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.”

Multiple sclerosis is a chronic autoimmune disease that affects both the brain and the spinal cord. Symptoms often include fatigue, muscle weakness, numbness or tingling, vision issues, balance problems and cognitive impairments.

Richard, who married Meredith in 1986, warned her about his illness on their second date.

“I told her about the illness, because I sort of learned the hard way to get it on the table,” he explained to Yahoo Lifestyle. “And she really didn’t blink.”

Meredith added, “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. It certainly wasn’t enough to scare me off.”

After Richard stepped away from his journalism career to focus on advocating for others with MS, Meredith eventually took her own career break to spend more time with her family.

“Time is one of those weird things,” she said when she left Today in 2011. “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.”

Richard opened up about the effects that MS had on his family in his 2018 memoir, Chasing Hope: A Patient’s Deep Dive into Stem Cells, Faith, and the Future.

“Chronic illness is a family affair,” he wrote. “Spouses have the burden of tending to the needs of a loved one, even when they would secretly rather push him out a window. I knew they should not be treated as spectators when they are in the ring with us.”