"Travis, we got to talk about it."
Sheinelle Jones is opening up about what she describes as a “beautiful nightmare.”
The 47-year-old “Today” show host returned to Studio 1A on Friday, Sept. 5 and sat down with her co-host Savannah Guthrie for her first interview since her husband’s death three months ago.
Sheinelle Jones’ husband, Uche Ojeh, died in May after a battle with brain cancer. He was 45.
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When asked how she was doing, Jones explained that she feels “OK” in the moment and on a day-to-day basis. But after everything she went through, she admitted that her “heart is shattered in a million pieces.”
“The life that I’ve known since I was 19 is no more,” she told Guthrie in the interview.
Jones was 19 when she met her husband, who was 17 at the time. They first laid eyes on each other while attending Northwestern University. Jones graduated in 2000 followed by Ojeh one year later.
The couple tied the knot in 2007 and welcomed their first child, a son named Kayin, in 2009, according to People. Three years later, they welcomed a set of twins — daughter Clara and son Uche.
In her interview, she recalled how she and her husband would sit in her college dorm room and stare at the beautiful view she had of the clock tower.
“We would stare out the window sometimes at the clock tower and talk and dream. Sometimes not talk — just be,” she said.
“Fast forward almost 30 years, I’m sitting in this beautiful hospital room and we were looking at this beautiful view of New York City. Here we are, again, not talking,” she continued.
Jones described her final moments with her husband in the hospital as a “full-circle moment.”
“It feels like a beautiful nightmare,” she said.
“It felt scary. It felt divine. It felt bigger than us,” she added. “But at the end of the day, when we shut the door and it was just us, that was always when we felt like we were at our best.”
She went on to reveal that Ojeh’s nurses would always call them “the lovebirds.”
“We would just look at each other, say ‘I love you,’ and hold hands,” she said. “But that’s what I mean by beautiful nightmare because I found beauty in the nightmare.”
Sheinelle Jones says ‘cancer doesn’t have to steal our joy’
Jones’ return to work comes nearly nine months after she took a leave of absence from the “Today” show.
In a January Instagram post, she explained that she was absent from the show due to a “family health matter,” but declined to go into detail at the time.
Several months later, Guthrie shared that Jones’ husband had died after a battle with glioblastoma.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, glioblastoma is a “grade IV brain tumor” and “devastating type of cancer that can result in death in fewer than six months without treatment.”
During her Sept. 5 interview, Jones shared what she has learned throughout this difficult time.
“Cancer doesn’t have to steal our joy,” she told Guthrie. “We can get up, we can get out of bed, and we can go to work. We can go to school. We can squeeze the most out of the days that we have.”
“And, honestly, I feel like Uche’s heartbeat lives on in mine,” she added.
Jones went on to clarify that she continued her role as co-host of the “Today” show for nearly a year after her husband’s diagnosis and would often support her husband at his treatments right after leaving work.
She decided to take her leave of absence when she realized her time with Ojeh was slipping away.
“I got to that place where I didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, so when I decided to take a leave, that was why — because I didn’t know what tomorrow would bring,” she said in the interview.
“I wanted to look back and know that I was strong,” she continued. “But I didn’t want to be so strong that I missed this blessing right in front of me — that I missed the fight, that I missed the beauty in the fight.”
Jones said she’s not only proud of herself for how she has coped, but also proud of her kids.
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“Im proud of my kids for how we’ve been able to pull through, but it’s horrible,” she said of Ojeh’s death. “But I’m here, I’m breathing. I’m OK.”
