NBC Today anchor Sheinelle Jones is opening up about the loss of her husband, nearly four months after he passed away from a rare form of brain cancer.
After taking a leave of absence, Jones, the co-host of Today’s third hour, returned to Today on Friday, where a pre-taped interview with her and co-anchor Savannah Guthrie aired, marking Jones’ first time discussing in-depth her husband’s battle and death. Jones had been absent from the show all year while her husband Uche Ojeh battled glioblastoma. Ojeh died in May at age 45.
“My heart is shattered in a million pieces,” Jones told Guthrie in the pre-taped interview. “The life that I’ve known since I was 19 is no more. I’ve always wanted kids, and I have three kids of my own now and they’ve lost their dad. And I’m their mom. It sucks.”
Jones described the moment in time as a “beautiful nightmare” and deals with her pain “day to day.”
Jones said it ordeal felt “scary,” “divine” and “bigger than us,” but they were at their “best” when they were just together. When reflecting on their time at the hospital, Jones said the nurses would call her and Ojeh “love birds” given they would “just hold hands” and “look at each other and say, ‘I love you.’” She also felt like it was “full circle moment” given they’d just sit with each other, enjoy each other’s company and not talk like they did during their college years.
“That’s what I mean by ‘beautiful nightmare,’ because I found beauty in the nightmare. And trust me, it is a nightmare to watch a 45-year-old do two triathlons and live and breathe off of soccer and his kids.” Jones explained. “To take a guy like that and watch him have to deal with this fight was a nightmare. But the way he fought it and the way we rallied together and the way we saw the best of humanity, that was beautiful.”
Jones revealed that she knew about Ojeh’s diagnosis prior to running a marathon and more than a year before she took a leave of absence from Today. But she reiterates she was not “faking” anything. ”I thought, ‘I’m not faking it. My joy is real.’ I was on television for almost a year with this,” she said. “I would do the show and then hop in the car and go be with him during chemo.”
Despite the tough battle, Jones said she “believed that he was going to be okay. I knew it was gonna be tough, but we all believed that he would be fine.” And she took a leave of absence to not miss any moments. “I was his oxygen sometimes,” she said.
After experiencing the loss, Jones said she doesn’t “run away from crying anymore when it comes to grief,” calling it her “cleansing rain.”
“I watched him in his toughest moments, his faith is what gave him peace,” Jones explained. “So I think, ‘Okay, if Uche can have faith, when his life is on the line, surely I can and surely we all can.’”
As she returns to Today, Jones said she hopes that she can encourage anyone to be strong even in a time of grief and remember that ”cancer doesn’t have to steal our joy. 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. So I owe it to him to just squeeze the most I can out of this thing.”
She added, ”If you see me now and you see me laughing, or you turn on the morning show and I’m laughing or having a good time, you root for me because I’m fighting for my joy.”
She and Ujeh had been married nearly two decades, first meeting at Northwestern University. They share three kids. Jones has been with the Today show for more than a decade, joining the morning program’s weekend edition in 2014. In 2019, Jones was named co-host of the show’s third hour.
