The granddaughter of late President John F. Kennedy, Tatiana Schlossberg, announced Saturday that she has less than a year to live amid a cancer diagnosis.
The 35-year-old journalist published an essay in the New Yorker magazine, writing that ten minutes after she gave birth to her second child, a baby girl, in May 2024, doctors noticed her white-blood-cell count “looked strange.”
She wrote in the magazine that she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3, shortly afterward. Schlossberg, who has been married to Dr. George Moran since 2017, wrote that she couldn’t believe this was happening.
“I had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I need to take care of,” she wrote.
Schlossberg said after several clinical trials and two transplants, her doctor told her he could keep her “alive for a year, maybe.”
Another tragedy hits the Kennedy family
The second of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg’s three children, Schlossberg said she received care at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City. She wrote searingly in her essay of the guilt she felt over another tragedy hitting the famous Kennedy family.
“For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry. Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life and there’s nothing I can do to stop it,” she wrote.
Caroline Kennedy, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Australia and Japan, lost her father, President John F. Kennedy, when he was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, by Lee Harvey Oswald — the same day, 62 years later, her daughter published her essay announcing her cancer diagnosis. She also lost her uncle Bobby Kennedy when he was shot and killed in 1968 while he was campaigning.
Her mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, died in 1994 at age 64 following a diagnosis of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Her brother, John F. Kennedy Jr., died in a plane crash off the coast of Massachusetts in 1999.
Kennedy’s cousin, Maria Shriver, urged people on social media on Saturday to read Schlossberg’s story to see what “a beautiful writer, journalist, wife, mother, daughter, sister, and friend” has been going through for the last year and a half.” Shriver said to let the story “be a reminder to be grateful for the life you are living today, right now, this very minute.”
Collecting memories
Schlossberg spends a portion of her essay writing about her family’s dismay regarding the nomination and confirmation of her cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. She spoke about how he cut nearly half a billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines and slashed funding from the National Institutes of Health. She wrote that hundreds of National Institute of Health grants and clinical trials were canceled.
She wrote that she worries millions of women might not get the care they deserve after she was given a dose of misoprostol to stop her postpartum hemorrhage. Because the drug is part of medication abortion, it is currently under review at the Food and Drug Administration, she wrote, due to her cousin’s urging.
Schlossberg mostly focused on writing about her family, how she is going to miss living life with her “kind, funny, handsome genius” husband she managed to find, and what would happen to her two young children growing up without their mother.
“Mostly I try to live and be with them now,” she wrote in The New Yorker. But she says that it is harder than it seems and tries to fill herself up with memories of her children, which she hopes she can carry with her after she is gone.
“Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I’ll remember this forever, I’ll remember this when I’m dead,” Schlossberg wrote.
