Suleika Jaouad secretly marry Jon Batiste before her bone marrow transplant

Jon Batiste and Suleika Jaouad revealed in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning that they married in a covert February ceremony the day before Jaouad’s bone marrow transplant as she battles Leukemia for the second time.

The Grammy winner and Jaouad spoke with CBS Sunday Morning about their February ceremony, which took place the day before Jaouad’s bone marrow transplant as she battles Leukemia for the second time.

Jon Batiste, a Grammy winner, and his longterm lover Suleika Jaouad have announced that they secretly married.

“We had this tiny, beautiful little ceremony. We didn’t have wedding bands, we used bread ties,” she said to correspondent Jim Axelrod. Jaouad described the ceremony as private, iven only four people were present. “And it was perfect,” she added.

Jaouad began her second battle with Leukemia eight days before the Grammy nominations were released in 2022, claiming her second struggle “far more aggressive than it had been a decade ago.”

“We’re sitting in this chemo suite together and these phone calls of congratulations are coming and we’re having to hold these two realities,” she said.

Batiste was unable to stay with Jaouad after she received a bone marrow transplant owing to the then-rising omicron variant of COVID-19. Batiste would write her a new lullaby while they talked on the phone, she wrote: “It felt like he was right there, you know, sleeping by my bedside.” Batiste said he wrote the lullabies “to fill the room with this healing properties.”

Despite the pair’s difficulties, Batiste described the current situation as “just a bump in the road” to their plans. The couple has been together for eight years.

“Ok this has happened, but this isn’t gonna interrupt the plan that we had, this is just a bump in the road… it’s an act of defiance. The darkness will try to overtake you, but just turn on the light; focus on the light, hold on to the light,” he said.

After learning of her diagnosis, Jaouad claims Batiste disclosed that he had been planning to propose for months: “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 the 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.”

Jaouad said they “walked into that 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. That sense of community, that sense of love, that sense of joy and spontaneity were so important.”

The CBS Sunday Morning special aired on the same day that Batiste was nominated for 11 Grammy Awards, including in the top categories of record of the year and album of the year, which he won for his album We Are.

When accepting album of the year award, Batiste reflected on how powerful music can be for many. “I believe this to my core, there is no best musician, best artist, best dancer, best actor…the creative arts are subjective and they reach people at a point in their lives when they need it most. It’s like a song or an album is made and it almost has a radar to find the person when they need it the most,” he said onstage.

Batiste also won four prizes earlier in the day, including best music video for “Freedom,” best score soundtrack for visual media for Soul, and best American roots performance and best American roots song for “Cry” in a nontelevised ceremony.

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