Tatiana Schlossberg, the 35-year-old daughter of Caroline Kennedy and a granddaughter of John F. Kennedy, revealed in an essay published in The New Yorker on Saturday that she is fighting a rare and aggressive blood cancer, acute myeloid leukemia.
Ms. Schlossberg, an environmental journalist, said in the essay that her cancer was discovered in May 2024, while she was in the hospital for the birth of her second child.
“I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me,” she wrote of her diagnosis. “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 know.”
“I had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I needed to take care of,” she continued. “This could not possibly be my life.”
The essay was published on the magazine’s website on the 62nd anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination. In it, Ms. Schlossberg described her harrowing medical journey of the past 18 months, the enveloping support of her parents and siblings, who, she wrote, “have been raising my children and sitting in my various hospital rooms almost every day,” and her oncologist’s quest to find a treatment that would save her life.
“He has scoured every inch of the earth for more treatments for me,” she wrote. “He knows I don’t want to die and he is trying to stop it.”
Ms. Schlossberg, a former science writer for The New York Times, lashes out at her first cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for policy decisions and budget cuts that put the nation’s well being, and her own fragile health, at risk. And she acknowledges, with raw honesty, the long history of tragedy in her family, and the pain of knowing that her illness has delivered her mother into another season of grief.
Ms. Kennedy, 67, a former ambassador to Australia and Japan, was five years old when her father was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963. Her uncle, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated five years later. Her brother, John F. Kennedy Jr., was killed in 1999, at 38 years old, when the small plane he was piloting crashed into the ocean en route to Martha’s Vineyard, off the Massachusetts coast.
“For my whole life, I have tried to be good,” to spare her mother further suffering, Ms. Schlossberg wrote. “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 details a series of intense and rapidly escalating treatments for her cancer, beginning with chemotherapy and a bone-marrow transplant. Her sister, Rose Schlossberg, donated stem cells to the transplant effort. Her brother, Jack Schlossberg, who is running for Congress, was a half-match but “still asked every doctor if maybe a half-match was better, just in case.”
Her husband, George Moran, a doctor, slept on the hospital floor, she wrote, and dealt with the demands of “doctors and insurance people that I didn’t want to talk to.”
“He is perfect,” Ms. Schlossberg wrote of her husband, “and I feel so cheated and so sad that I don’t get to keep living the wonderful life I had with this kind, funny, handsome genius I managed to find.”
In remission from the cancer after 50 days of treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, Ms. Schlossberg went home, began a new round of chemotherapy, and relapsed, she wrote. She joined a clinical trial in January, trying an immunotherapy in which doctors tried to program her transplanted T-cells to attack the cancer. A second transplant followed.
Ms. Schlossberg said she tried to be “the perfect patient.”
“If I did everything right, if I was nice to everyone all the time, if I didn’t need any help or have any problems,” she wrote, “then it would work.”
Adding to her fears were the actions of her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services, who she calls “an embarrassment” to her family. She describes her alarm that his attacks on vaccines could leave her “to spend the rest of my life immunocompromised,” and her horror as she watched the government eliminate millions in funding for mRNA vaccines used to fight some cancers, and from the budget of the National Institutes of Health, cuts that disrupted treatments and clinical trials for thousands of patients.
“Suddenly,” she wrote, “the health care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky.”
While striking notes of anger and frustration, Ms. Schlossberg centers much of the essay on her love for her two young children, and her grief and disbelief that she will not be there to see them grow up. She reminds her son often “that I am a writer,” she notes, “so that he will know that I was not just a sick person.”
She also poignantly describes the dissonance of striving to live in the moment with her children, and imprinting vivid memories of their time together, while knowing that the memories she is making will die with her.
She recalls one memory she treasures, of her son and an ice cream truck, when she told him that she didn’t want ice cream herself. “He hugged me, patted me on the back, and said, ‘I hear you buddy, I hear you,’” she wrote.
Jenna Russell is the lead reporter covering New England for The Times. She is based near Boston.
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