Tatiana Schlossberg, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and granddaughter of the late John F. Kennedy, has been diagnosed with a form of terminal cancer at 35 — and is sharing her immediate thoughts after receiving the news.
“During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe,” Schlossberg wrote in a moving essay for The New Yorker published on Sunday, November 23, revealing she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia shortly after she gave birth to her baby girl in May 2024.
Her doctor had noticed an imbalance in her white blood cell count, initially assuming it was pregnancy-related. The doctor later discovered that she has “a rare mutation called Inversion 3.”
“My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember her,” she continued in the essay, titled “A Battle With My Blood.” “My son might have a few memories, but he’ll probably start confusing them with pictures he sees or stories he hears. I didn’t ever really get to take care of my daughter — I couldn’t change her diaper or give her a bath or feed her, all because of the risk of infection after my transplants.”
Tatiana Schlossberg’s brother, Jack Schlossberg, is showing his support after his sister revealed her terminal cancer diagnosis. On Saturday, November 22, Tatiana, 35, revealed in an essay titled “A Battle with My Blood,” published by The New Yorker, that she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia after welcoming her second baby in May 2024. In […]
She continued, “I was gone for almost half of the first year of her life. I don’t know who, really, she thinks I am, and whether she will feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother.”
Schlossberg shares her 3-year-old son and 18-month-old daughter with her husband, George Moran. The pair tied the knot in 2017.
Towards the end of her essay, Schlossberg opened up about how she is spending her time now — with what doctors tell her is less than a year to live — and what she is forcing her mind to remember about her two children before she is gone.
Tatiana Schlossberg in September 2019. Craig Barritt/Getty Images for New York Magazine
“My son knows that I am a writer and that I write about our planet. Since I’ve been sick, I remind him a lot, so that he will know that I was not just a sick person,” she pens. “When I look at him, I try to fill my brain with memories. How many more times can I watch the video of him trying to say ‘Anna Karenina’? What about when I told him I didn’t want ice cream from the ice-cream truck, he hugged me, patted me on the back, and said, ‘I hear you, buddy, I hear you’? I think about the first time I came home from the hospital. He walked into my bathroom, looked at me, and said, ‘It’s so nice to meet you in here.’”
She continued, “Then there’s my daughter, her curly red hair like a flame, squinting her eyes and grinning a gap-toothed grin after taking a sip of seltzer. She stomps around the house in bright-yellow rain boots, pretending to talk on my mother’s phone, a string of fake pearls around her neck, no pants, giggling and running away from anyone who tries to catch her. She asks us to play James Brown’s ‘I Got a Feeling’” by picking up a portable speaker and saying, “Baby, baby.”
Tatiana Schlossberg condemned her cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for his vaccine skepticism while announcing her terminal cancer diagnosis. The environmental reporter, 35, shared the heartbreaking news in a New Yorker essay on Saturday, November 22, that she’d been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and had been given one year to live by her doctors. […]
Despite her best intentions and mindfulness, Schlossberg went on to explain that “being in the present is harder than it sounds,” adding that in the midst of the difficulty she simply lets “the memories come and go.”
“So many of them are from my childhood that I feel as if I’m watching myself and my kids grow up at the same time,” she continued. “Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I’ll remember this forever, I’ll remember this when I’m dead. Obviously, I won’t. But since I don’t know what death is like and there’s no one to tell me what’s coming after it, I’ll keep pretending. I will keep trying to remember.”
