By Movieguide® Contributor
Jay Leno uses humor to cope with his wife’s dementia diagnosis and knows it’s important to find “moments where you can have a laugh and have fun.”
“You try to find the humor in this situation,” he said of his wife, Mavis’ diagnosis. The couple has been married since 1980. “I took my wife shopping, I can see she’s a little down, [so I said], ‘Come on, we’ll go to the mall.’ So we go to Nordstrom’s and I said, ‘You see anything you like?’ ‘No, no.’ So we look at the shoes, and [she says], ‘Oh, I like these sneakers.'”
“So I see she’s happy, and I said ‘This is great.’ So I got two pairs of sneakers, and [the cashier says] ‘That’s $24. And the other pair, that’s $847,'” Leno explained. “I go, ‘No, I only had two pairs of sneakers. I thought these were $24.’ [The cashier] goes, ‘Yeah, these are $24. But the other ones were [designer sneakers]. It looked like the guy took a pair of the same sneakers and used a bedazzler on them, and they were $800. I look at my wife and said, ‘You like these?’ I go, ‘Honey, you look great.'”
But Leno wants to do anything to make her happy.
“It’s fine, I’m glad I can afford this and it made my wife happy. It just made me laugh. Just typical,” he said. “I thought the $24 pair looked better than those, but that’s okay. It just made me laugh, and I think when you’re dealing with this kind of thing, you find your moments where you can have a laugh and have fun, and my wife really likes them and felt good about it.”
In 2024, Leno was granted conservatorship over their estate upon learning of Mavis’s dementia diagnosis.
In an interview with Fox News Digital, Leno said, “It’s OK. You know, it’s life. Everybody goes through it. I’ve been very lucky in my life. I don’t complain about everything. We have a lot of fun, and I cook dinner for her every night.”
Related: Jay Leno Protects Wife as She Battles Dementia: ‘She Trusts Him’
In April 2024, Mavis joined her husband on the red carpet for the premiere of the comedy-drama film, UNFROSTED.
When asked how she was doing, Mavis told Entertainment Tonight, “I feel great.”
Read Next: Jay Leno Given Conservatorship for Wife With Dementia
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