Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy, disclosed that she has been diagnosed with terminal cancer in a deeply personal essay published in the New Yorker magazine on Saturday.
In “A Battle With My Blood,” the 35-year-old environmental journalist wrote that the illness was discovered shortly after she gave birth to her daughter in May 2024. Her doctor noticed an abnormally high white blood cell count in the hours following the delivery, which led to the discovery of acute myeloid leukemia with a rare mutation called Inversion 3.
Acute myeloid leukemia is a type of blood cancer that starts in the bone marrow and often rapidly moves into the blood, according to the American Cancer Society.
“During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe,” Schlossberg wrote.
She recounted the harrowing course of her treatments: spending five weeks at Columbia-Presbyterian hospital in New York, undergoing chemotherapy, and being transferred eventually to New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, one of the largest bone-marrow transplant centers in the United States.
In January, she joined a clinical trial of CAR–T-cell therapy, a type of immunotherapy found to be effective against some blood cancers. She started another clinical trial after relapsing.
“First, I had graft-versus-host disease, in which new cells attack old ones, and then, in late September, I was downed by a form of Epstein-Barr virus that blasted my kidneys,” she wrote. “When I got home a few weeks later, I had to learn how to walk again and couldn’t pick up my children. My leg muscles wasted and my arms seemed whittled into bone.”
She described being confounded at first by the cancer diagnosis, saying she was “one of the healthiest people” she knew. She recalled having just swum a mile in the pool while nine months pregnant.
In the essay, Schlossberg also denounced the actions of her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, citing the strain he placed on the nation’s health care system and scientific research.
She highlighted that under Kennedy’s leadership, the Trump administration slashed National Institutes of Health grants and enacted regulatory measures that imperiled medical research and access to treatments, including those crucial to her own survival.
“I worried about funding for leukemia and bone-marrow research at Memorial Sloan Kettering. I worried about the trials that were my only shot at remission,” writes Schlossberg, whose mother wrote to the Senate in a bid to stop Kennedy’s confirmation.
Schlossberg’s mother, Caroline Kennedy, is JFK’s daughter and served as the U.S. Ambassador to Australia and Japan. Schlossberg’s brother, Jack, announced earlier this month he would run for Congress to succeed longtime Rep. Jerry Nadler in New York’s 12th Congressional District. Jack Schlossberg highlighted his sister’s essay on Instagram and candidly said: “Life is short, let it rip.”
The New Yorker piece adds another chapter to the Kennedy family’s history of loss, the star-crossed family long regarded as American political royalty. It was published on a date of difficult import to the family: the 62nd anniversary of her grandfather’s assassination.
Schlossberg’s grandmother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, died of cancer at 64 in 1994. Her uncle, John F. Kennedy Jr., and his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, died in a plane crash in 1999.
“Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I’ll remember this forever, I’ll remember this when I’m dead. Obviously, I won’t,” Schlossberg wrote.
“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.”
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