Sheinelle Jones calls husband Uche Ojeh's passing a 'beautiful nightmare' as she makes her way back to the Today show

NBC News correspondent and prominent news anchor and journalist Sheinelle Jones has recently opened up about her late husband, Uche Ojeh, who passed away four months ago after suffering from a rare type of brain cancer known as glioblastoma. The 47-year-old Jones reflected on her life following her husband's death as she returned to the Today show, which she co-hosts with Savannah Guthrie, on September 5, 2025.

While she was on an extended leave of absence since late 2024, Guthrie, on September 1, 2025, announced that Sheinelle Jones would be back on the show on September 5. Jones was married to Ojeh for almost twenty years and shared three kids: Clara, Uche, and Kayin. In a pre-taped interview with Guthrie, Sheinelle Jones, for the first time, spoke publicly about her husband's death. Jones said:

"My heart is shattered in a million pieces. 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."

Sheinelle Jones told Savannah that she deals with her pain "day to day" and added, "It's horrible. It's just horrible." She said:

"It's a beautiful nightmare."

As she recalled the time she spent with Ojeh while he was in the hospital, Jones said:

"And we would just hold hands and the nurses would come in and they're call us the 'love birds.' And we'd just look at each other and say, 'I love you'... 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 ... 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."

Sheinelle shared with Guthrie that she had been aware of Ojeh's cancer diagnosis for over a year before she took her extended leave of absence from Today. While she did not want to "fake" her happiness on the show, Sheinelle Jones said:

"I thought, 'I'm not faking it. My joy is real.' I was on television for almost a year with this. I would do the show and then hop in the car and go be with him during chemo."

Jones shared with Guthrie that she thought Ojeh would somehow make it and pull through. She said:

"I believed that he was going to be okay. I knew it was gonna be tough, but we all believed that he would be fine."

Sheinelle Jones revealed that her husband's death changed her attitude toward grief. She said:

"I don't run away from crying anymore when it comes to grief. I see it as, 'Okay, here comes my cleansing rain. And it's okay.'"

Sheinelle Jones shared how she chose to handle her husband's death

Now that Sheinelle Jones has decided to slowly move forward in her life, she revealed how she chooses to handle Ojeh's death. Jones said:

"I watched him in his toughest moments, his faith is what gave him peace. So I think, 'Okay, if Uche can have faith, when his life is on the line, surely I can and surely we all can.'"

Sheinelle Jones' coming back to the Today show was intentional, as she wants to inspire people who have faced a similar situation. Jones shared:

"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 went ahead and said:

We can grieve but we can also still try to move forward. We don't move on, but we move forward with our loved ones. And I hope that just by me being on the set and me returning to work, it's like, 'Okay, if I can do it, so can you.'"

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Sheinelle Jones urged audiences to look at her struggle from a different perspective and said:

"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."

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