Jon Batiste is not only a five-time Grammy winner, he's also a newlywed.
The 35-year-old musician recently revealed that he privately wed author Suleika Jaouad back in February.
"We've been secret married until this moment," Jaouad also shared while on CBS Sunday Morning April 3. "We didn't have wedding bands. We used bread ties."
Still, it hasn't been a completely celebratory time for the couple of eight years. Back in November, Jaouad, 33, was diagnosed with leukemia for a second time, having gone into remission in her 20s. As she told correspondent Jim Axelrod, "It was far more aggressive than it had been a decade ago."
So, the night before Jaouad's bone marrow transplant, they said, "I do," an event that would have one day happened for the pair regardless of health.
"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,'" she recalled. "But once we realized we had this tiny window before the bone marrow transplant, we decided to go for it."
Which meant getting their marriage license while she was in the operating room having a catheter placed in her chest. "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 laughterm," 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."
And 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.
"The darkness will try to overtake you," he said. "But just turn on the light. Focus on the light. Hold on to the light."