“Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek is speaking out this week to praise his wife Jean, saying that she “kept me alive” during his battle with stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
Trebek, who turned 80 today, opened up about his marriage of 30 years in his new memoir “The Answer Is… Reflections On My Life.” It is made clear in the book that Jean, 55, has been Trebek’s rock during his cancer battle.
“She’s kept me alive,” Trebek told People magazine [1]. “If it weren’t for Jean, I’d had put myself out of this a long time ago.”
Trebek met Jean through a mutual friend when he was a newly-divorced 47 year-old and she was 23. At the time, Jean was doing bookkeeping for the friend, and Trebek had been hosting “Jeopardy!” for four years.
“With Jean, it just happened,” Trebek wrote in his memoir. “Sometimes you look at something, you look at someone, and you know. I mean, you’ve heard stories of people who meet and decide within half an hour; I knew this was going to be the person I’d end up with.
“With Jeanie, that’s how it was,” he continued. “I wasn’t looking for love. But I recognized at a gut level that here was someone who was going to complete me as a human being.”
Trebek confessed that the age difference was a concern for him at first.
“At first it worried me,” he said. “But then I thought, ‘To hell with it. We’ll make it work.’”
The game show host also recalled the first time he met Jean’s father.
“He was running a private investigation firm in New York, and he had arranged for a boat to host some family and friends for an engagement party,” Trebek wrote. “When Jeanie introduced me to him, he took one look at me and said, ‘I guess I won’t be calling you ‘son.’”
Trebek and Jean tied the knot in 1990, and neither of them have ever forgotten their wedding.
“When the minister said, ‘Do you, Alex, take Jean to be your wife?’” he wrote. “I said, ‘The answer is… Yes.’ Leave it to me, always trying to go for a laugh. And I got one. Everybody cracked up.”
Trebek and Jean would go on to have two children together, and they just celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary. They have stayed strong through Trebek’s cancer diagnosis, which he received in March of last year.
“I’ve got [a] framed image,” wrote Trebek. “Jeanie gave it to me. It’s a line from our favorite movie, ‘Wuthering Heights.’ ‘Whatever our souls are made of, yours and mine are the same.’ That’s the way I look at our relationship. We are one soul in two bodies.”
This piece originally appeared in UpliftingToday.com [2] and is used by permission.
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