Former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly shared the news of her sister’s death Monday on her Sirius XM show.
Kelly’s sister, Suzanne Crosley, died suddenly on Friday of a heart attack. She was 58. Kelly described that her sister’s health hadn’t been the best over the past couple of years, with “one problem after another.”
“It was saddening,” she said in the show during a segment you can watch above. “It was unexpected.”
Kelly received the news after her show Friday and went to visit her sister with her mom, brother Paul and nephew Brian, one of Suzanne’s three kids, when she died.
“It was really hard. It was extremely emotional. My poor mom, as you all as all moms and dads out there know this is not the order in which this is supposed to happen,” Kelly said. “So in any event, we were all together over the weekend. I’m going back up there after the show today and she will have her funeral tomorrow.“
Kelly expressed relief at having tomorrow’s show already taped, but she also explained that coming to work has been helpful during this time.
“I said to myself, ‘Do I come back? Do I do Monday’s show? Do I not do Monday’s show? And really like for me, It’s better to be here,” she said. “Like it’s — maybe you can relate but it’s more cathartic to work. Like it gave me a couple of hours where I could take my mind off of it and do my job and talk about stuff that matters. It’s not like what we talked about on the show doesn’t matter not entirely every day but most days.”
Still fresh, Kelly said she would need more time to process the news of her sister’s death, and once she does, she will have more to say. She then connected this event to Fox co-anchor Ainsley Earhardt’s mother’s passing over the weekend.
“I saw that easily. Earhart’s mom died over the weekend, too. It’s just a reminder to hug the people you love, right? How short and tenuous life is and how important it is to stay close to the people you love,” she said. “We can’t all be perfect on that front but we can make a little effort day by day just to shoot a text or return a call. I’m never really good at that. So it’s a big reminder to me and just how fleeting things can be.
“We get ourselves so upset over shit that doesn’t matter,” Kelly continued. “This is one that does.”
Kelly concluded by reminding her viewers to see the humanity in people, giving an example of one of her mother’s caretakers who juggled her own husband’s cancer treatment with being there for her mother, who would have been alone around the time of Suzanne’s heart attack otherwise. Kelly’s mother lived with Kelly’s sister.
“That’s humanity. That’s the true essence of humanity. Not all the terrible people we talk about all the time on the show and in the news and who you encounter when you have road rage or they have it,” she added. “That’s what it is to be truly like a human being and to see another person’s humanity. To step in and self-sacrifice to help another who you don’t know that well.”