Kelly Rizzo remembered her husband Bob Saget in emotional interviews that aired Thursday on the “Today” show and “Good Morning America.”
In her first televised interviews since Saget was found dead in his Orlando, Florida, hotel room on January 9, Rizzo spoke with NBC’s Hoda Kotband ABC’s TJ Holmesabout her husband. The couple married in 2018.
The comic was very happy to be out on the road again and felt compelled to make people laugh given the current state of the world, she said on “Today.”
Rizzo shared that their final communication was filled with love. “I think I said ‘I love you dearly’ and he said ‘I love you endlessly’ and then I said ‘I can’t wait to see you tomorrow,” she said. “It was just all love.”
Rizzo echoed that on “Good Morning America,” saying that when she last spoke with Saget on the phone, “He was just on his way home, or back to his hotel, and he was telling me what a wonderful show he had, and how it was so amazing.”
“And he was happy and just loving what he did,” she said. “It made him so happy to just bring laughter to people.”
Saget met Rizzo, a food and travel blogger, via Instagram six years ago and the pair shared a deep and abiding love. She and Kotb were moved to tears when Rizzo talked about how her husband would rush back whenever he was on the road.
He would go to sleep at 2 a.m. and wake up at 4 a.m. just so he could be on a 6 a.m. flight to come home to her, Rizzo said.
“He valued every single second we had together,” she said, fighting back tears. “That is why this is so heartbreaking.”
In the wake of his death everyone, including fans, has rallied around Rizzo. “That has been the one silver lining from this is the incredible outpouring of love and support, not only from just everybody that loved Bob, but also his friends and family,” she said. “I don’t know how else I’d be getting through this right now.”
Rizzo shared memories about who her husband was – with a common theme being how incredibly loving he was to everyone he met, making sure to tell everyone he loved them.
Saget was as wonderful as he seemed and tried to make everyone feel special, Rizzo said, with his constant message being to “treat everybody with kindness.”
Saget was “the best man I’ve ever known in my life,” she said. “He was just so kind and so wonderful and everybody that was in his life knew it,” Rizzo said. “And even anybody that would just casually meet him was like, ‘Wow, this is a special guy.’”
RIzzo is now concentrating on continuing his legacy, including his work with the Scleroderma Research Foundation.
Saget’s sister, Gay, died from the rare autoimmune disease and the SRF estimates that in the more than 30 years he volunteered with the organization, he helped raise more than $26 million to help find a cure.
“He had three life’s works,” Rizzo said. “That was his children, comedy and then the SRF. He spent over 30 years tirelessly working so hard to try and find a cure for scleroderma and that’s why anything I can do to help keep that legacy going and just help with the SRF because it meant so much to him.”
Rizzo told Holmes that her husband seemed to be in good health prior to his death and that his having Covid in December “was not anything serious.”
The investigation into his cause of death is ongoing.
