Tragedy has struck the Kennedy family once more as Tatiana Schlossberg, 35-year-old granddaughter of slain President John F. Kennedy, revealed on Saturday she has less than a year to live after being diagnosed with blood cancer.
She disclosed the prognosis in a New Yorker essay titled “A Battle With My Blood,” poignantly published on the November 22 anniversary of her grandfather’s 1963 assassination in Dallas 62 years ago.
The mother of two wrote that she has myeloid leukemia with a rare mutation. The first paragraph gets right to her experience in what can only be described as powerful prose:
When you are dying, at least in my limited experience, you start remembering everything. Images come in flashes—people and places and stray conversations—and refuse to stop. I see my best friend from elementary school as we make a mud pie in her back yard, top it with candles and a tiny American flag, and watch, in panic, as the flag catches fire. I see my college boyfriend, wearing boat shoes a few days after a record-breaking snowstorm, slipping and falling into a slush puddle. I want to break up with him, so I laugh until I can’t breathe.
She continues, “Maybe my brain is replaying my life now because I have a terminal diagnosis, and all these memories will be lost. Maybe it’s because I don’t have much time to make new ones, and some part of me is sifting through the sands.”
Schlossberg reports that physicians discovered a high white cell count in her bloodwork just hours after she gave birth to her second child in May 2024 at Columbia-Presbyterian hospital in New York. Doctors thought it could be something related to the delivery or “it could be leukemia,” she wrote.
“It’s not leukemia,” she told her husband George Moran, who was then a urology resident at the hospital. “What are they talking about?”
But it was.
Since then, she and oncologists have been fighting the disease with chemotherapy, blood transfusions and a bone-marrow transplant. The mutation that afflicts Schlossberg is called “Inversion 3,” and is typically only seen in older patients.
In January, she joined a clinical trial of a new cell therapy. But she writes she has been told she has less than 12 months to live.
Schlossberg, the daughter of President Kennedy’s daughter Carolyn, is a Yale graduate with a master’s degree from Oxford. She previously worked as a journalist at The New York Times and published her first book in 2019 about everyday impact humans have on the environment.
The Kennedy family – the descendants of New Deal-era ambassador and businessman Joseph P. Kennedy – is often reported to have an inordinate share of unforeseen deaths and tragedy, with sensational media even applying the phrase “the Kennedy curse” over the years.
Family tragedies well preceded the president’s 1963 assassination. Joseph Kennedy’s eldest son Joe died in a 1944 World War II plane crash. Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, JFK’s sister, died in a plane crash in bad weather in France in 1948.
The untimely deaths continued. Schlossberg’s great uncle, former Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was felled by an assassin’s bullet while campaigning for the presidency in Los Angeles in 1968.
Her uncle – her mother’s brother, John F. Kennedy, Jr., went down in a small plane crash into the waters of the Atlantic in an ill-advised flight he tried to pilot to Martha’s Vineyard one foggy night in 1999. His wife and sister-in-law also perished in that accident.
Other deaths in the Kennedy clan over the decades include a suicide, two drug overdoses, a skiing accident, and two who drowned.
Schlossberg is the second of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg’s three children. Her brother Jack, 32, is running for Congress in the 12th Congressional District being vacated by Manhattan Rep. Jerold Nadler (D-NY).
Schlossberg has been married to urologist George Moran, whom she met as an undergrad at Yale, since 2017. The couple has two children: son Edwin, 3, and a daughter, now aged 18 months.
She writes in her New Yorker piece of the eventual loss her children may experience.
“My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me,” she wrote.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
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