Journalist and author Tatiana Schlossberg – daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, and granddaughter of late President John F. Kennedy — died Tuesday at age 35 following a battle with leukemia, her family announced.
The news was shared through social media by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum: “Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts,” the statement read.
Schlossberg revealed her terminal diagnosis in a deeply personal essay published in The New Yorker this past November, sharing that she had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, including a rare mutation known as Inversion 3. Doctors discovered the cancer in May 2024 after she gave birth to her second child, when routine blood work showed an abnormally high white blood cell count. She wrote of receiving the diagnosis: “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. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew.”
Schlossberg spent weeks hospitalized at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York, followed by chemotherapy at home, bone marrow transplants and participation in multiple clinical trials, including immunotherapy. Her sister Rose was a stem cell match and donated cells for her first transplant. “My brother was a half-match, but he still asked every doctor if maybe a half-match was better, just in case,” she wrote of her younger brother, Jack.
In her essay, Schlossberg described the emotional weight of her illness on her family, particularly her mother, who has endured repeated personal loss. “For my whole life, I have tried to be good… 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.” When doctors later told her that treatment could extend her life only briefly, she wrote: “During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe. My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me.”
Schlossberg and physician George Moran were married in September 2017 in a ceremony at her family’s home on Martha’s Vineyard, after meeting when they were undergraduates at Yale University. The couple share two children, a son born in 2022 and a daughter born in May 2024. Schlossberg wrote candidly about missing much of her daughter’s first year due to the risk of infection following her transplants. “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 wrote that she focused on spending time with her family after her diagnosis — especially her young children: “Mostly, I try to live and be with them now. But being in the present is harder than it sounds, so I let 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. 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 comes after it, I’ll keep pretending. I will keep trying to remember …My son knows that I am a writer and that I write about our planet,” she wrote. “Since I’ve been sick, I remind him a lot, so that he will know that I was not just a sick person.”
An accomplished environmental journalist, Schlossberg worked at The New York Times and contributed to outlets including The Atlantic and The Washington Post. She held a bachelor’s degree from Yale and a master’s degree from Oxford, and had been planning further research on ocean conservation before her diagnosis.
Schlossberg is survived by her husband, George Moran and their two children; her parents Edwin and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg; as well as sister Rose, and brother Jack.
Editorial credit: KinoMasterskaya / Shutterstock.com
