Sheinelle Jones made her return to the “Today” show on Friday with a pre-taped interview with fellow co-host Savannah Guthrie, in which she opened up publicly for the first time about the death of her husband, Uche Ojeh.
Friday marked Jones’ first appearance on the “Today” show since December 2024. She took a leave of absence late last year to deal with what she called in January a “family health matter.” Her leave of absence was extended in May when Ojeh, her husband of 18 years, died following a brain cancer diagnosis.
In their interview together that aired Friday morning, Guthrie began the conversation by simply asking Jones how she was doing.
“In this moment, I’m OK. Day-to-day, I’m OK. From a macro picture, how am I doing? My heart is shattered. My heart is shattered in a million pieces,” Jones replied. “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.”
“I’m proud of myself for how I’ve coped so far. I’m proud of my kids for how we’ve been able to try to pull through. But it’s horrible. It’s just horrible,” Jones continued. “It’s a beautiful nightmare.”
Jones and Ojeh were married for nearly two decades and had three kids together: 15-year-old Kaylin and 12-year-old twins Clara and Uche. Speaking with Guthrie, Jones explained how she managed to find beauty in her final months with her husband, even when he was sick in the hospital.
“We would just hold hands and the nurses would come in and they would call us ‘the love birds.’ And we’d just look at each other and say, ‘I love you,’” Jones remembered. “It is a nightmare to watch a 45-year-old do two triathlons and live and breathe off of soccer and his kids, 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.”
“I believed that he was going to be OK. I knew it was going to be tough, but we all believed that he would be fine,” Jones added, revealing that she knew about her husband’s diagnosis for over a year before she began her leave of absence in December. “I got to that place where I didn’t know what tomorrow would bring. When I decided to take a leave, that was why.”
Now that she’s back, Jones said she wants viewers who may be struggling with grief to find comfort in watching her as she continues her own journey with it.
“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. Honestly, I feel like Uche’s heartbeat lives on in mine,” the NBC co-host explained. “I owe it to him to just squeeze the most I can out of this thing.”
“I hope that just by me being on the set and me returning to work, it’s like, ‘OK, if I can do it, so can you,’” Jones continued. “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.”
After the airing of her pre-taped interview with Guthrie, Jones returned to the “Today” show couch for the first time in nine months and thanked her co-hosts, once again, for the love and support they have offered her over the past year.
