Tell any Jeopardy fans this – “She’s been the devoted wife of Alex Trebek for thirty years, and was one of the first to spot the game show host’s cancer” – and they’ll answer, “Who is Jean Trebek?” Now, one year after announcing that he had been diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer, Jean, 56, has shared some insight on her 80-year-old husband’s battle in a new essay for Guideposts, a spiritual publication. “We’d gone to Israel to visit the sites of the Holy Land in December 2018,” writes Jean. “We’d finished dinner one night, and I looked across the table at Alex. His coloring seemed off. ‘You feeling okay?’ I asked.”
He wasn’t. “Later, back home in California,” she writes, “things were still not right. His doctor ran some tests, then some more. We weren’t so worried that we canceled a trip to New York. It was there, in our hotel, that we got a call from his doctor. “We need to see you as soon as you get back from your trip. We have some concerns.” Those concerns turned out to be a terrifying reality. Since then, she has been helping him in his fight. While Alex has been able to buck the odds and survive stage IV cancer for over a year, Jean says there are days when she feels “really sad and angry.”
“Then I’ll say, ‘That’s enough, Jean.’ I’ll try to do something for someone else to pull myself out of it. Not just for Alex but for one of our friends,” she wrote. Through her positivity, her dedication, her love, and her faith, Jean has been able to find “joy” in these times. As she continues to enjoy every moment with her husband, here’s the scoop on the woman who captured Alex Trebek’s heart.
1. Jean has been married to Alex for 30 years. Alex and Jean reportedly meat at a party in 1988, according to People, and instantly hit it off. They got on so well that two years later, they were married, despite the 24-year age difference between them. Over the past three decades, Alex and Jean welcomed two children – Matthew and Emily. Alex was previously married to Elaine Trebek, but the two divorced in 1981 (he adopted Elaine’s daughter, Nicky, while they were still together.
Alex proposed to Jean on her 26th birthday. At first, he gifted her a bolero jacket and a pair of black velvet pants. “I thought that was it,” she told People. “Then he said, ‘Here’s a little something else,’ and he took out this little wicker box.” It was a ring with a 16-carat sapphire surrounded by diamonds. “It took my breath away. I mean, it was a rock.”
2. Jean lost her brother over 35 years ago. “I’d grown up on the East Coast,” Jean wrote in her Guideposts essay, “in a tight-knit Catholic family on Long Island.” She says she had an older brother named Chris and a younger sister named Audrey. “I moved to California to go to Pepperdine University. College was exciting, but it was so hard being away from everything I’d known. Chris was a year and a half older than me, and I looked after him. We were inseparable. Like Frick and Frack, my mom said.”
“We went to school together, and I promised my parents that I would watch out for him. Sometimes I would even leave my classroom to go check on him. I took care of my brother, and it felt like a gift rather than a burden,” she wrote. Tragically, her brother was killed in a car accident on Dec. 7, 1984. “The worst day of my life,” she wrote.
3. She didn’t know who Alex was when she first met him. After leaving Pepperdine, Jean remained on the West Coast, “trying to recover from a tragedy I never thought I’d get over,” she writes in Guideposts. She was working part-time, doing “bookkeeping for a guy in Malibu.” One of her boss’s friends was a certain television game show host. “He’d come over every Saturday to play backgammon and have lunch. I knew that he was on some TV show, but he never said much about it, and I didn’t ask.” She later called her mother to tell her that she “met this nice guy,” to which her mom said, “Don’t you know who he is? … He’s the host of that game show Jeopardy!”
4. Alex’s wife is a healer and deeply spiritual. Jean is a “professional sound healer” and a Reiki master, according to Newsweek. Reiki, according to Reiki.org, is “a Japanese technique for stress reduction and relaxation that also promotes healing.” She is also reportedly a practitioner of Religious Science.
5. She also runs a lifestyle blog. Jean is the creator of InsideWink.com, a “lifestyle website, and my blog on the site is a way to share our journey with others,” she wrote on Guidepost. She has interviewed “actors, spiritual leaders, others who have made a difference.” The slogan at her sight has become a mantra during her husband’s battle: “share the good.”
“We go on little walks together, if he’s up to it,” says Jean, about Alex. “We eat dinner together. We watch comedies and movies on TV. Or we’ll sit in the swing in our backyard and sway to and fro, feeling the warmth of the sun, gazing at the flowers or up at the sky, knowing we are loved.”