Hoda Kotb was in her feels listening to a sweet story Jenna Bush Hager shared about her late grandfather.
On the Wednesday, June 5, episode of Today With Hoda & Jenna, Bush Hager, 42, tearfully reminisced about an “evening I spent with my grandpa” not long before he died. “He could barely speak. And I was sitting between him, and he leaned over to me and he’s like, ‘Don’t forget to enjoy the game.’”
Bush Hager didn’t specify which of her grandfathers the story was about. She is famously one of the late former President George H. W. Bush’s many grandkids. Bush Hager and her twin sister, Barbara Pierce Bush, are the only grandchildren of their mother Laura Bush’s late parents, Harold Welch and Jenna Hawkins, as Laura, 77, is an only child. (Welch died at age 82 in 1995, while H. W. Bush died at age 94 in 2018.)
Bush Hager went on to note that although her grandfather’s life was coming to a close, hers felt like it was just “beginning,” adding, “To hear somebody that had done everything be like, ‘Don’t forget to, like, be in it, to enjoy it, to be part of it,’ I’ll never forget it.”
His words are something Bush Hager hopes others will take to heart. “In the middle of it’s hard,, and there’s tedious moments. But, I think, what we gotta do is, that tediousness is the beauty,” she explained before mentioning Kotb’s upcoming New York City move with her daughters Haley, 7, and Hope, 5. “You were showing me videos of your girls as you prepare for a transition. It’s like, you could have thought, ‘Ugh, they have me up in the middle of the night again.’ But you were in it,” she said.
Kotb, 59, got teary-eyed as she chimed in. “What great advice from him because you always wonder, like, at the end, what are you saying?” she stated. “Like, after you’ve lived a whole life, what are you saying at the very end? And that was it.”
Sharing another heartfelt memory, Bush Hager said that her grandfather (whom she once again didn’t specify) wrote “the most beautiful letters” to her and his other grandkids in his 70s and 80s, expressing that “all he wanted was us to come home and that was what brought him the most joy, was to be surrounded by his grandkids and his family.”
Kotb concluded the discussion by calling Bush Hager’s story “really beautiful.”
Kotb got emotional while discussing her own family last week on Hoda & Jenna as she pondered what her late father Abdel Kader Kotb’s relationship with her daughters would be like. (Kotb shares her kids with her ex-fiancé Joel Schiffman.)
“I was actually thinking about him with the girls,” she said while choking up on the May 29 episode of the NBC morning show, which would have marked her dad’s 91st birthday. Bush Hager offered her cohost some comforting words, stating that Kotb’s father would be “so, so proud” of her and her daughters.
Earlier this week, the hosting duo also recalled more family memories while chatting about Kotb’s NYC move. “I was thinking about the very first time we brought them home and carried them up those stairs in that car seat and placed them in a little thing and all the things that happened there,” Kotb detailed on Monday, June 3. “And I was looking through old videos of them, when they were so little, and it’s like you want to hold onto things and you want to let go.”
Bush Hager shared similar sentiments about her and her husband Henry Hager’s decision to move out of their old apartment two years ago. “We brought our babies home to this place. Henry and I weathered, you know, beautiful things and hard things,” Bush Hager — who shares kids Mila, 11, Poppy, 8, and Hal, 4, with Hager, 46 — shared. “I lost my grandparents in that apartment, and my girls drew stick figures and made me feel better. What it does is it distinctly marks time. You don’t normally get to think, ‘Oh, my gosh. Here we are. Here I’m going.’”
