“Today” star Sheinelle Jones this week launched her new show with Jenna Bush Hager with a bang – and guests including Oprah Winfrey.
But she admits the idea of returning to work in the wake of husband Uche Ojeh’s tragic death from an aggressive brain cancer left her frozen.
“I worried that I wouldn’t know how to smile,” she tells Page Six, “I worried that I wouldn’t know how to laugh. I love my job so much. And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, what if it’s not the same?’ Because I’ve never known this job without him.’ “
Jones, 47, spent every waking moment by Uche’s side in hospice before he passed away last May aged 45, just 18 months after being diagnosed with glioblastoma.
It never truly crossed her mind that he would not make it.
“People don’t believe me,” she said, “The truth of the matter is, even in hospice, I kind of didn’t believe it. I know it defies logic, but I didn’t see it coming.
“I didn’t turn on the news. I didn’t see TV. All I cared about was him and my three kids,” she said, referring to son Kayin, 16, and twins Clara and Uche, 13.
“I just went into mama bear mode. I didn’t care about myself. I wanted him to, every time he opened his eyes to see me, I wanted, anytime a doctor would come in that room, I wanted him to see me – nothing else.”
It was Jones’ co-star, Dylan Dreyer, who gently nudged her to leave work in January 2025 after weeks of ping-ponging between the studio and the hospital, only telling viewers she was dealing with a “family health matter”.
“I wore the same black leggings every day. I don’t think my hair ever saw a brush,” she recalled.
“I had a rotation of hoodies…it almost felt like a different matrix. I would look sometimes at the nurses that would come in the middle of the night and help me, because at first I was doing everything. They were like, ‘Why don’t you be a wife and let us be nurses?’
“But I would see the nurses come in or the doctors … with such care and such humanity. And sometimes I would think, ‘God, does the rest of the world know what’s happening in this matrix, in these hospitals?’
“These people deserve purple hearts. I mean, we honor our veterans, we honor our teachers. one day I’m going to honor these folks.”
There is no real cure for glioblastoma, as Jones said, “They give you the diagnosis and then you’re like, ‘okay, we can do this’.”
Their friends who were doctors cried. “I still didn’t take the hint because I just figured a breakthrough has to be coming. Let’s just try to stay alive until they can come up with a breakthrough,” she said
“We have little kids, so you want to live. And so I watched him. He was so brave. It is just we were determined… you go into this mode of nothing else matters.”
Jones explained glioblastoma is hard to treat, particularly as it is in the brain. While some people can have it removed, depending on where the cancer is and its severity, that’s not always possible.
“You are helpless. All you can do is just trust. There’s no phone call to make to get a drug, because there is no drug,” she added.
Jones met Uche when she was a freshman at Northwestern University and he was a high school senior visiting the campus. While she was not an official guide, she offered to show him around after he and his father asked her for directions 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 think ‘God, did you know this was going to happen to me when I was walking down campus’?”, she said. “I could have just stayed in my dorm room an extra 30 seconds and my whole world would’ve been different.”
Jones landed her first job as a morning anchor and reporter at WICS-TV in Springfield, Illinois, before a nine-year run at FOX’s “Good Day Philadelphia”. She joined NBC in 2014.
“A friend of mine just reminded me that Uche made my resume tape to get my job at NBC,” Jones said. “I didn’t know how to do technology. He was a little techie. And I’ve just never known life and television without him.”
During her time away from the show, she was supported by co-stars including Savannah Guthrie, Craig Melvin and Al Roker, who would all come to the hospital. She also took guidance from Maria Shriver, who recently lost her cousin, Tatiana Schlossberg, to cancer aged 35.
Although she “always worried” about returning to work, they stood by her.
Although initially, “I felt like I was in this metaphorical free fall,” she admitted, “There was one day Savannah came up to the hospital and she said ‘you need to get out of here’.
“Obviously. It’s like one of those things where you don’t comb your hair, you’re just 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 for the day, and sometimes I never know where my oxygen’s going to come from.’ ”
“We are both pretty spiritual and she talked about the story in the Bible about manna from heaven and she said, ‘You may not know when you’re going to get it, but I believe you’re going to get a little bit of manna every day.’
“And you wake up in the morning and you’re going to feel like you can’t get out of bed, but just know somehow you’re going to get a little manna every day. And that has been true every single day’.
Jones describes her husband of 17 years as a “renaissance man” as well as a keen soccer player and guitarist.
She returned to NBC Studio 1A last September, appearing on the main show and back to her regular duties as co-host of the third hour with Dreyer, Melvin and Roker.
She has also stood in as main anchor for Guthrie, who is recovering after vocal surgery.
Bush Hager, meanwhile, had been hosting the 10am hour with a revolving cast of ‘friends’, since the departure of her co-host, Hoda Kotb, in January 2025.
Although rumors abounded Jones would be perfect, the journalist said, “I’m a single mom now with three kids. It’s weird to even say it, and I am trying to get my sea legs again.
Things moved quickly. When bosses officially offered Jones the gig last month, it was Thursday, December 4 – and they announced the news live on air the following Tuesday.
“Jenna and Sheinelle” debuted this past Monday and she said, “It’s an out of body experience, and the little girl in me and the woman who has had a tough 18 to 24 months is watching everything that’s happening.”
Back in November 2023, Jones ran the New York Marathon, greeted at the end with a kiss from Uche.
But her grief is still constant. “Little did I know I was preparing me for the biggest marathon it of life,” she said. “And I remember when I was running towards mile 23 and the roar of the crowd, it literally feels like it’s carrying your feet. Your muscles don’t have anything left, and it’s the signs and strangers who don’t even know you.
“And you look at the sign and it’s like, ‘you got this’ and you think it’s for you. Right? It carries you through. That is what the support I have received has felt like for me.
For now, her kids are the most important thing, and she wants to start raising awareness about glioblastoma.
“By raising awareness about it, you’re putting it out in the public lexicon,” she said. “You just hope, we didn’t find a cure in time for Uche, but maybe we can find it for the next person.”
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