SINGER and 2022 Grammy winner Jon Batiste and his longtime partner Suleika Jaouad were recently revealed to have married.
Jaouad, author of the best-selling cancer memoir Between Two Kingdoms, said in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning that she and Jon secretly married in February, shortly before she went in for a bone marrow transplant after being diagnosed with leukaemia.
“We got married the day before I was admitted to the hospital to undergo my bone marrow transplant,” Jaouad told corespondent Jim Axelrod. “We have known that we wanted to get married, I think, from the first week that we started dating.
“That’s when Jon first brought up the topic of marriage to me. So, we’ve had eight years. This is not, you know, a hasty decision!”
The author went on to say that Batiste's proposal was not because of the diagnosis, and that he had been preparing it for a year. She added that when they recognised the little window of opportunity before the bone marrow transplant, they decided to seize it and marry.
The couple was able to obtain their marriage licence swiftly, and they held a small and beautiful ceremony in which they “used bread ties” instead of formal wedding rings. They “walked into the bone marrow transplant unit on cloud nine,“ according to Jaouad.
“We were so happy, so brimming with love and positivity from this beautiful evening that we’d had,” she remarked. “And I really believe that that carried us through. That sense of community, that sense of love, that sense of joy and spontaneity were so important.”
Last year, the singer discussed the making of his album, We Are, and how his song Show Me the Way represents the embodiment of his love with Jaouad.
Meanwhile, Batiste walked into the Grammy Awards on Sunday night with 11 nominations and ended up as the night's biggest winner.
He took home five awards, including album of the year for We Are, best American roots song and performance for Cry, best music video for Freedom, and best scoring soundtrack for visual media for the Pixar film Soul.
