Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of John F. Kennedy, died Tuesday, just over a month after revealing her terminal cancer diagnosis. She was 35.
Schlossberg announced in a Nov. 22 essay that she had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and given a year to live, at most. She was first diagnosed in May 2024.
“Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts,” several Kennedy family members wrote Tuesday in social media posts shared by the JFK Library Foundation.
Schlossberg was the daughter of the 35th president’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy, and Caroline’s husband, Edwin Schlossberg. She had two children of her own, Edwin and Rose, with her husband, physician George Moran.
In fact, it was just after she gave birth to Rose that Schlossberg was diagnosed with leukemia.
“I did not—could not—believe that they were talking about me,” she wrote in November for The New Yorker. “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 also noted the history of tragedy in her family. Her essay was published on the 62nd anniversary of her grandfather’s assassination, and her uncle, John F. Kennedy Jr., died in a plane crash in 1999 at age 38.
“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 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.”
Schlossberg built her career as a science and environmental journalist, landing at The New York Times in 2014 and writing about a number of topics. In a particularly bizarre twist, she wrote a story that year about a dead black bear cub in Central Park. Ten years later, her cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would admit to dumping the bear there.
Schlossberg’s New Yorker essay, in which she explained her chemotherapy treatments and the offers from her family to help in any way, drew worldwide praise and sympathy. Her sister, Rose, donated stem cells for her treatment. Her brother, Jack, who is running for Congress in Manhattan, was only a half match.
She also agonized over the fact that 3-year-old Edwin and Rose, 1, would hardly have any memories of their mother because they are so young.
“Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I’ll remember this forever, I’ll remember this when I’m dead,” she wrote in November. “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.”
