What To Know
- Craig Melvin’s mother, Betty Jo Melvin, is celebrating one year since she completed her cancer treatment.
- Betty Jo was diagnosed with breast cancer in June 2025.
- The Today anchor’s mom opened up about her diagnosis and shared an update on how she’s doing one year later.
Craig Melvin‘s mother, Betty Jo Melvin, is celebrating a milestone in her breast cancer journey.
Following a mammogram in June 2025, the Today anchor’s mom got the call that she had breast cancer. “I definitely was not expecting them to tell me anything else. I really wasn’t,” Betty Jo shared in an interview with Today.com published on Wednesday, August 19. “I was so speechless the person that called me had to call me back. She says, ‘I’m calling you to check on you.’”
Betty Jo says she cried after getting the diagnosis, both because it was unexpected and because she has lost several loved ones to cancer over the years. Her 3-year-old granddaughter died from a rare form of sarcoma, and her son, Lawrence Meadows, died of colon cancer in 2020. “All those things come back to you. When you hear that word, they come back,” she stated.
Betty Jo spent the months after undergoing surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, adding more pain to her other health issues such as rheumatoid arthritis. She said the treatment also took a mental toll. It was with the help of her friends, family, and faith that she was able to push through difficult moments.
“When I sound like I might be trying to go down in a hole, they’ll say, ‘Uh-uh. No, no, no, no, no. We’re not going to feel sorry for ourselves,’” she said. “And I’m not necessarily feeling sorry for myself, but I am thinking about all the things around me that’s happening, or I’m hurting today or I can’t walk today.”
Now, Betty Jo is celebrating one year since completing her cancer treatment. “It did feel good, it really did,” she said of ringing the celebratory bell last fall. “And it felt good because I’m like, ‘OK, there’s one more thing that was thrown at me. … OK, God, you said just trust you. And I trusted you. I didn’t trust anybody else. I just trusted you.’”
Craig, for his part, called his mother the “most resilient person” he knows, adding, “She was the first in our family to go to college. She grew up in the projects. She did not have the best front row seat, shall we say, to a happy marriage between my grandmother and my grandfather. She saw abuse up close, and she overcame all of that.”
During the Monday, August 17, episode of Today, Melvin got emotional while watching a video of a grandmother celebrating the completion of her own cancer treatment. “I think that sat with me,” he said of the clip. “I do think that I move so fast all the time that sometimes I don’t sit with things as long as I should.”
He continued, “I was so focused on getting (my mom) the best care, and making sure she was OK and … we got the second opinion and the treatment options — obviously my younger brother and I and my dad, we were the first faces she saw when she came out of the procedure — but I think just focused so much on getting her through it and making sure she was OK.”
Betty Jo said she still has a long way to go on her cancer journey and will have to continue taking a breast cancer drug for the next five years and continue to undergo screenings. The biggest lesson she said she’s learned from the health ordeal is that material things don’t compare to the love you receive from loved ones.
“When I was having surgery, those things that were surrounding me didn’t matter. … I can’t take any of those things with me. But what I could take with me is what I’ve done with my family and my friends, how they feel, how I feel about them,” she shared. “It’s the times we’ve had together. To me, those things mean the most. Whether people realize it or not, those are really the most important things, because when it’s all said and done, that’s all that’s going to matter.”
Today, Weekdays, 7 am/6c, NBC