Five-time Grammy winner Jon Batiste has revealed that he had privately wed his longtime love and author Suleika Jaouad after she had been diagnosed with leukemia for a second time.
As per E! News, the couple exchanged their vows in February on the day before her bone marrow transplant.
"We've been secret married until this moment," the 35-year-old musician shared with a media outlet. "We didn't have wedding bands. We used bread ties."
Back in November, Jaouad, 33, was diagnosed with leukemia for a second time, having gone into remission in her 20s. The night before Jaouad's bone marrow transplant, the couple of eight years said, "I do," an event that would have one day happened for the pair regardless of health.
Jaouad shared, "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. But what I do want you to know is that this diagnosis doesn't change anything. It just makes it all clearer to me that I want to commit to this and for us to be together. But once we realized we had this tiny window before the bone marrow transplant, we decided to go for it."
She shared that they got their marriage license while she was in the operating room.
"It was absurd!" she said. "There were nurses around, there were surgeons around. We had this computer. I was in a hospital gown. But we made it happen."
It wasn't the fairy-tale they had dreamed of, but a happily-ever-after nonetheless.
"And that night we went and bought our wedding outfits together, very last-minute, lots of laughter," she detailed. "But it was, you know, not anything like what we'd imagined. There were maybe four people present. It was private. It was tiny. And it was perfect."
While Batiste couldn't stay with Jaouad for the transplant due to the coronavirus pandemic, he wrote her a lullaby each night to show his support.
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