Jay Leno has revealed a heartbreaking struggle his wife endured due to her dementia, saying the disease caused her to start every morning for roughly three years thinking she’d just learned that her mother died.

“I mean, probably the toughest part was every day she’d wake up and realize someone had called today to tell her her mother had passed away,” Leno said in a Thursday interview with NBC’s “Today.”

The former “Tonight Show” host has been married to Mavis Leno for 45 years. He filed for conservatorship over the 79-year-old’s estate in January 2024, citing her dementia diagnosis as the reason for his filing.

Leno told “Today” that one of the biggest challenges he and his wife have faced was her experiencing daily grief over losing her mom.

“Her mother died every day for, like, three years,” he said. “And it was not just crying. I mean, you’re learning for the first time. Each time was … really tricky.”

Mavis’s mental decline has made it difficult for the Lenos to do a lot of things, like traveling and eating in restaurants, but the 75-year-old classic car collector said they enjoy going for drives.

“She seems happy and she seems contented. It’s actually OK,” he said. “You know, I enjoy taking care of her.”

Leno said much of the care he gives his wife involves comforting his wife amid her confusion.

“She wants to be reassured that everything’s OK,” he said. “Now she really needs me and I like that. And I can tell she appreciates it. The idea that you get married, you take these vows, nobody ever thinks they’ll be called upon to act on them. You know that part — for better or worse. But even the ‘worse’ isn’t that bad.”

Leno hosted “The Tonight Show” from 1992 until 2014. He succeeded Johnny Carson, who spent 30 years on the late-night program now helmed by Jimmy Fallon. Leno is a member of the Television Academy Hall of Fame and the Automotive Hall of Fame.

Mavis Leno is an activist and philanthropist, who spent decades on the board the Feminist Majority Foundation. Her work on the Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan garnered Nobel Peace Prize consideration in 2002.

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Jane Fonda thought ‘drugs and loneliness’ would kill her before age 30

Jane Fonda isn’t “afraid of aging” nor dying, but the Hollywood icon and activist admits she assumed she’d succumb to “drugs and loneliness” before the age of 30.

The two-time Oscar winner, who will celebrate her 88th birthday next month, told Michelle Obama’s limited series podcast, “The Look,” that she “didn’t think [she’d] live past 30.”

“My mother died when I was 12,” Fonda said, referencing how her mother, Frances Ford Seymour, died by suicide in 1950. “My youth was not especially happy and I thought I was gonna die … I’m not addictive, but I thought I was gonna die from drugs and loneliness. So the fact that I’m almost 88 is astonishing to me. And what is even more astonishing is that I’m better now. … I wouldn’t go back for anything.”

The “Grace and Frankie” star also shared in the podcast that she’s “never been afraid of aging” and “more importantly … not afraid of dying,” though she is “afraid of dying with a lot of regrets,” as was the case for her father Henry Fonda.

In recent decades, that principle has “guided” Fonda, who has “been living to not have regrets.”

Prior to 1970, the Emmy winner acknowledged she was living a “quite hedonistic and quite superficial life” but believes “old age is fantastic, if it’s lived intentionally.”

“Light makes sense of dark,” Fonda said, adding that she prefers being older. “Noise makes sense of silence. Death makes sense of life. And if you don’t deal with it, you’re not really living fully, I think.”

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Kim Kardashian used alias to bid $80,000 on Bible dad gave to O.J. Simpson

Kim Kardashian was the one who anonymously paid $80,000 to buy back the Bible her late father gave to friend and client O.J. Simpson after the slayings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.

The “Kardashians” star, 45, said in a confessional on Thursday’s episode of the Hulu reality series that she “used an alias to bid on the Bible.” It was purchased for $80,276 on March 29, though $65,800 would have sufficed as a winning bid.

“This is really special to me, ’cause this used to be my daddy’s,” the Skims founder says while unwrapping the Bible beside daughter Chicago, 7. “So if anyone was wondering … who won that O.J. Simpson auction, you best believe it was me. … I thought it was a Bible that my dad bought O.J. It’s actually my dad’s Bible with his name inscribed on it. I didn’t know that.”

In the confessional, Kardashian clarifies she initially reached out directly to Simpson’s estate to “offer to buy it without having to go through the auction.” But she was put off when the correspondences were ultimately published on TMZ, seemingly to “drive up more sales for the auction.”

She explains to her daughter that the defense attorney, who died in 2003, “gave this book to his best friend to give him some motivation from Jesus,” and there’s even a note to Simpson, dated June 18, 1994. That was months before the former NFL star was tried for the deaths of Brown Simpson and Goldman, for which he was ultimately acquitted.

Still sitting with Chicago, Kardashian — who gave the Bible to younger sister Khloé — explains that Simpson “went to jail. It’s a long story, I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

From combined wire services