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 announced the tragic news in a personal essay published in the New Yorker on Saturday, sharing that she has acute myeloid leukemia with a rare mutation called Inversion 3, which is usually seen in older patients.
“Maybe my brain is replaying my life now because I have a terminal diagnosis, and all these memories will be lost,” the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg painfully writes.
Schlossberg described how doctors discovered the cancer just hours after she gave birth to her second child in May 2024.
She has much of the time since in treatment, receiving a bone-marrow transplant, chemotherapy, and blood transfusions.
In January, Schlossberg joined a clinical trial of CAR-T-cell therapy, a type of immunotherapy against certain blood cancers. However, she was told by her doctor that she had around a year 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 doctor George Moran since 2017. The couple has two children: son, Edwin, 3, and a daughter, now aged 18 months.
In The New Yorker essay, Schlossberg agonizingly describes the prospect of her children growing up without memories of her.
“During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe,” she writes. “My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me. 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 Manhattan Rep. Jerold Nadler (D-NY).
She writes that her family has been helping to raise her two young children, and describes the heartbreak of adding further tragedy to her mother’s 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 painfully 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 Nov. 22 – the 62nd anniversary of her grandfather’s 1963 assassination.
Caroline Kennedy’s life has full of tragedy.
Her uncle, Ambassador Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated in 1968, less than five year’s after father’s death.
Her mother, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, died in 1994 at the age of 64 following a short battle with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of cancer that spread to her spinal cord, brain, and liver.
Her older 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 had served as a flower girl at their 1996 wedding.
This is a developing story.
Read the full article here
