Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of JFK, given less than a year to live
Tatiana Schlossberg, the only granddaughter of assassinated US president JFK and the daughter of ex-US ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy, has shared devastating health news.
Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy, has less than a year to live after being diagnosed with cancer.
The 35-year-old mother-of-two disclosed the tragic news in a personal essay published in the New Yorker on Saturday, sharing that she has acute myeloid leukaemia with a rare mutation.
“Maybe my brain is replaying my life now because I have a terminal diagnosis, and all these memories will be lost,” the daughter of former US ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy, 67, and Edwin Schlossberg, 80, heartbreakingly wrote.
Schlossberg described how doctors discovered the cancer just hours after she gave birth to her second child in May 2024.
She has spent the past 18 months in treatment, receiving a bone-marrow transplant, chemotherapy, and blood transfusions. The rare mutation with which Schlossberg is afflicted, Inversion 3, is usually seen in older patients.
In January, Schlossberg joined a clinical trial of CAR-T-cell therapy, a type of immunotherapy against certain blood cancers. However, she has been told by doctors that she has less than 12 months to live.
Schlossberg, who graduated from Yale and has a Master’s degree from Oxford, previously worked as a journalist at The New York Times and published her first book in 2019.
She has been married to urologist George Moran, whom she met as an undergrad at Yale, since 2017. The couple has two children: son, Edwin, 3, and a daughter, 18 months.
In her essay for the New Yorker, Schlossberg agonisingly describes the prospect of her children growing up without memories of her.
“My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me,” she writes. “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.”
Schlossberg is the second of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg’s three children.
She has an older sister, Rose, 37, and a younger brother, Jack, 32, who is running for Congress in the 12th Congressional District being vacated by New York Democrat Jerold Nadler.
In a New York Times profile published earlier this month, Jack — who sported a buzz cut this past summer — revealed he had shaved his head “in solidarity with someone close to him who is sick.”
Jack posted to Instagram on Saturday, shortly after the news of his sister’s terminal cancer diagnosis was made public, writing: “Life is short — let it rip.”
Meanwhile, in her New Yorker essay, Schlossberg took aim at her mother’s cousin, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., arguing that potential funding cuts to healthcare will jeopardise the well-being of cancer patients.
“I watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government,” Schlossberg wrote of RFK Jr’s confirmation.
“Suddenly, the healthcare system on which I relied felt strained, shaky. Doctors and scientists at Columbia, including [husband] George, didn’t know if they would be able to continue their research, or even have jobs,” she continued. “Bobby is a known sceptic of vaccines and I was especially concerned that I wouldn’t be able to get mine again, leaving me to spend the rest of my life immunocompromised, along with millions of cancer survivors, small children, and the elderly.”
Schlossberg also wrote that her immediate family has been helping to raise her two young children amid her treatment, and describes the heartbreak of adding further tragedy to her mother’s already turbulent life.
“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,” she states. “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.”
Schlossberg’s article was published on November 22 – the 62nd anniversary of her grandfather’s 1963 assassination.
Indeed, Caroline Kennedy’s life has been full of tragedy.
Her uncle, Ambassador Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated in 1968, less than five years after her father’s death.
Her mother, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, died in 1994 at the age of 64 following a short battle with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which spread to her spinal cord, brain, and liver.
Her younger brother, John F. Kennedy, Jr., died in 1999 at age 38 in a plane crash that also killed her sister-in-law, Caroline Bessette Kennedy, 33.
Tatiana Schlossberg served as a flower girl at their 1996 wedding.
Maria Shriver — Caroline Kennedy’s cousin — took to Instagram shortly after the publication of Schlossberg’s essay, describing her as “extraordinary.”
“Tatiana is a beautiful writer, journalist, wife, mother, daughter, sister, and friend,” Shriver remarked. “Let it be a reminder to be grateful for the life you are living today, right now, this very minute.”
Several other famous names shared their condolences.
“My heart is breaking for Tatiana,” Katie Couric — whose own husband died from cancer when he was 42, leaving behind their two young children — wrote.
“The most beautiful and courageous story,” CBS star Norah O’Donnell added.
This article originally appeared on the New York Post
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