In “Matriarch,” a memoir from Tina Knowles, the mother to Beyoncé and Solange Knowles reveals she was diagnosed with breast cancer last year.
“I’ve always tried to take care of myself. I just… was in disbelief,” Tina Knowles told CBS Mornings in an interview. Tina Knowles says she and her doctors discovered the cancer after the pandemic delayed her routine mammogram appointment that hadn’t been rescheduled until last year.
She says the cancer they found was in the form of one benign and one malignant tumor, with both cases deemed slow-growing. In August, Knowles underwent a lumpectomy to remove the tumor, and is now happily cancer-free.
In her book, Knowles revisits telling her daughters the news and told CBS that Beyoncé and Solange, in addition to Kelly Rowland and niece Angie Beyincé, helped ease her nerves ahead of the surgery: “I was nervous, and they just started joking with me and Solange pulls up this video of this young trans woman and she’s saying, ‘I’m very demure and intentional’,” she said, referencing a viral TikTok video from content creator Jools Lebron. “And we’re just laughing at it. And she’s showing me this. And we just look at it right before the surgery. I’m just laughing, and I get out of my head.”
Knowles expressed how much it meant to her that her daughters and family members were by her side at this time. “I thought about the song ‘Walk With Me,’ which they used to sing all the time,” she said.
Solange and her niece Beyincé proceeded to sing the song to her, which she described as: “God walking with you into something and protecting you.” She tearfully added, “And I went in there feeling just like, ‘God has got me.’”
After the surgery, Knowles developed a post-op infection which caused her to nearly miss the Glamour 2024 Women of The Year event, where she was an honoree. “Mama, you’re not yourself,” she recalled Beyoncé telling her. “Your health is more important. Don’t go.”
Knowles persisted on attending, adding, “a lot of my life, I just refused to be recognized. I would never take an award, I would never want the attention to me… and this was my saying, ‘I deserve this.’”
Watch the interview below.
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