“Today” star Sheinelle Jones kicked off her new show with a bang this week with guests including Jenna Bush Hager and Oprah Winfrey.
However, she admitted that the idea of returning to work was solidified after her husband Uche Ojie tragically passed away from a malignant brain tumor.
“I was worried that I wouldn’t know how to laugh. I love what I do so much, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, what if it’s not the same?'” she told Page Six. Because I couldn’t have known this work without him. ” “
Jones, 47, spent every waking moment by Uche’s side in hospice care until she passed away last May at age 45, just a year and a half after being diagnosed with glioblastoma.
It never crossed her mind that he wouldn’t be able to pass.
“People don’t believe me. In fact, even in hospice, I didn’t believe it. I know it defies logic, but I never saw it coming,” she said.
“I didn’t turn on the news. I didn’t watch TV. All I cared about was him and my three children,” she said of her son Cain, 16, and twins Clara and Uche, 13.
“I just went into mama bear mode. I didn’t care about myself. That’s what I wanted him to do. Every time he opened his eyes to see me, every time the doctor came in that room, I wanted him to see me. There was nothing else.”
After weeks of shuttling between the studio and the hospital, Jones’ co-star Dylan Dreyer gently urged her to quit her job in January 2025, telling viewers only that she was dealing with “family health issues.”
“I wore the same black leggings every day. I don’t think I ever had a brush in my hair,” she recalled.
“I was rotating Parker…It felt like another Matrix. I would sometimes look at the nurses who would come in the middle of the night and help me, because at first I was doing everything. They said, ‘Would you be my wife and let us be nurses?’
“But I saw nurses and doctors come in so attentive and so humane. And sometimes I thought, ‘God, does the rest of the world know what’s going on in this Matrix, in this hospital?’
“These people deserve a Purple Heart. I mean, we honor our veterans, we honor our teachers. One day I’m going to honor these people.”
As Jones says, there is no fundamental treatment for glioblastoma. “Once you get the diagnosis, you’re like, ‘Okay, I can do this.'”
Their friends who were doctors cried. “I still didn’t accept the hint because I thought there had to be a breakthrough. Until they come up with a breakthrough, let’s just try to survive,” she said.
“We have young children, and you want to live. So I was watching him. He was very brave. We just decided… you go into this mode where nothing else matters.”
Jones explained that glioblastoma is difficult to treat, especially when it occurs in the brain. Depending on the location and severity of the cancer, it may be possible to remove it in some people, but it is not always possible.
“You are powerless. All you can do is believe. There is no need to call to get medicine because there is no medicine,” she added.
Jones met Uche when she was a freshman at Northwestern University and he was a high school senior visiting campus. She was not an official guide, but when he asked her for directions with her father, she offered to show him around because she thought he was “cute.”
Eight years later, Uche proposed to her on the same campus, and they married in Philadelphia in 2007.
“I thought, ‘God, did you know this was going to happen to me as I was walking on campus?'” she said. “If I had stayed in my dorm room for 30 seconds more, my world would have been different.”
Jones got his first job as a morning anchor and reporter at WICS-TV in Springfield, Illinois, and then spent nine years on FOX’s “Good Day Philadelphia.” She joined NBC in 2014.
“A friend reminded me that Uche had made a resume tape to get a job at NBC,” Jones said. “I didn’t know how to use technology. He was a bit of a techie. And I didn’t know life or television without him.”
During her time away from the show, she was supported by her co-stars, including Savannah Guthrie, Craig Melvin, and Al Roker, who all visited her at the hospital. She also received guidance from Maria Shriver, who recently lost her cousin Tatiana Schlossberg to cancer at age 35.
They supported her even though she was “always worried” about going back to work.
At first, she admitted, “I felt like I was in a metaphorical free fall.” “Savannah came to the hospital one day and said, ‘Get out of here.’
“Of course. It’s like not combing your hair and just being in it. So we went to this little restaurant around the corner from the hospital and had margaritas. And I said, ‘You were my oxygen that day. Sometimes I don’t know where my oxygen comes from.'”
“We’re both very spiritual, and she told me about the story of manna from heaven in the Bible, and she said, ‘I don’t know when I’ll get it, but I believe that every day you get a little bit of it.’
“And when you wake up in the morning, you’ll feel like you can’t get out of bed. But know that somehow every day you get a little bit of mana. And that was true every day.”
Jones describes her husband of 17 years as a “renaissance man” and an avid soccer player and guitarist.
She returned to NBC Studio 1A last September, appearing on the main show and returning to her regular duties as third-hour co-host alongside Dreyer, Melvin, and Roker.
She also filled in for Guthrie’s main anchor while he was recovering from vocal cord surgery.
Meanwhile, Bush Hager had hosted the 10 a.m. show along with a rotating cast of Friends since co-host Hoda Kotb left the show in January 2025.
There were rumors that Jones would be perfect, but the reporter said, “I’m a single mom with three kids right now, and I know it feels weird to say this, but I’m trying to get back on the water again.”
Things moved quickly. Bosses formally offered Jones the gig last month on Thursday, December 4, with the news announced on live TV the following Tuesday.
“Jenna & Sheinelle” opens this Monday, and she said: “It’s like an out-of-body experience, where the little girl inside me and the woman who’s been through a rough 18-24 months is watching everything that’s going on.”
Back in November 2023, Jones ran the New York Marathon and was greeted with a kiss from Uche at the end.
But her grief continues. “Little did I know I was preparing for the biggest marathon of my life,” she said. “And I remember running towards mile 23 and the crowd cheering. It literally felt like I was being carried away. There was nothing left in my muscles. And it’s the signs and the strangers who don’t even know you.”
“And then you see the sign and you’re like, ‘I got this,’ and you think this is for you. Right? It supports you. That’s how the support I received felt to me.
For now, her children are most important and she wants to raise awareness about glioblastoma.
“By raising awareness about it, you’re putting it in the public lexicon,” she said. “Please stay tuned. Although we haven’t found a cure for Uche, we may find a cure for the next person.”
