Jon Batiste secretly married his longtime girlfriend Suleika Jaouad toward the start of the year, it has been confirmed.
Jaouad, who had been diagnosed with leukemia for the second time, told "CBS Sunday Morning" that she had exchanged vows with Batiste shortly before she was scheduled for a bone marrow transplant in February.
"We got married the day before I was admitted to the hospital to undergo my bone marrow transplant," she said. "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!"
Jaouad added that the fact that she had leukemia and was to undergo a bone marrow transplant had nothing to do with their decision to get married.
"He said to me, 'I just want to be very clear, I'm not proposing to you because of this diagnosis. It's taken me a year to design your ring. So, just know this timing has nothing to do with it,'" Jaouad recounted, explaining that Batiste was insistent that her diagnosis did not change anything for him.
"It just makes it all the clearer to me that I want to commit to this and for us to be together,'" she recalled him saying. "But once we realized we had this tiny window before the bone marrow transplant, we decided to go for it."
After the "tiny" but "perfect" wedding, Jaouad said she and Batiste walked into the bone marrow transplant unit "on cloud nine."
"We were so happy, so brimming with love and positivity from this beautiful evening that we'd had," she said. "And I really believe that that carried us through."
Jon was the biggest winner at the Grammys on Sunday night as he earned five awards including top prize album of the year for "We Are." After picking up his Grammy Awards, he told reporters that his wife's leukemia helped give him perspective when asked about the "duality" of the moment.
"It puts it in perspective. Life has ups and downs. And sometimes the ups and downs occur at the same time," he said, according to the Daily Mail. "And when you have that happening, it really lets you know by shaking your consciousness and saying, 'Be present. Be here.' So what's going on back home and what's happening today are both in their proper place for me."
© 2022 Newsmax. All rights reserved.