In a poignant and deeply personal essay published Saturday, Tatiana Schlossberg, the 35-year-old environmental journalist and granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy, disclosed that she has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and given a prognosis of less than a year to live.
The news adds another chapter of heartbreak to the storied, yet often tragic, history of the Kennedy family. Schlossberg, the daughter of former U.S. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy and designer Edwin Schlossberg, revealed in The New Yorker that she is battling Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) with a rare mutation, an illness discovered just hours after she gave birth to her second child in May 2024.
The Sudden Onset and Harrowing Treatments
Schlossberg’s diagnosis was a shock, contradicting her self-perception as one of the healthiest people she knew. She detailed in her essay, titled “A Battle With My Blood,” how a routine check of her white blood cell count just minutes after delivering her daughter revealed a severe abnormality.
“I did not—could not—believe that they were talking about me. I had swum a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick.”
Since the diagnosis, Schlossberg has endured a grueling year and a half of treatment, including multiple rounds of chemotherapy, two bone-marrow transplants—the first from her sister, the second from an unrelated donor—and participation in experimental clinical trials. During her latest trial, she received the devastating prognosis.
She recounted the immense physical toll, including developing a life-threatening complication where her new cells attacked her old ones, and the struggle to regain the strength to walk again and hold her two young children, aged three and one.
The Political Dimension: A Family Feud Made Public
The essay quickly drew national attention not only for its candid personal account of facing death but also for its scathing criticism of her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the current Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Schlossberg accused her cousin’s policies of directly jeopardizing the nation’s medical research infrastructure and her own access to life-saving treatment.
- Research Cuts: She wrote that she watched as her cousin “cut nearly a half billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers” and “slashed billions in funding from the National Institutes of Health.”
- Healthcare Strain: She detailed her fear that the health system she relied on felt “strained, shaky” after the administration temporarily withdrew federal funding from her hospital, NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center.
Schlossberg revealed that her mother, Caroline Kennedy, had previously written to the Senate urging them to reject her cousin’s confirmation, highlighting the deep rift the political appointment has caused within the family.
A Mother’s Grief and the Kennedy Legacy
The diagnosis comes on the 62nd anniversary of her grandfather, President Kennedy’s assassination, an eerie coincidence that underscored the family’s long history of public tragedy.
In a heartbreaking reflection, Schlossberg wrote of the guilt she feels for adding to her mother’s burden of grief. “For my whole life, I have tried to be good… 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 confessed.
Schlossberg concluded her essay by focusing on her final months, dedicating her remaining time to creating memories with her husband and young children, acknowledging the painful certainty that she will not be there to watch them grow up.
“Mostly, I try to live and be with them now,” she wrote. “I will keep trying to remember.”