Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of JFK, dies at 35 after revealing cancer diagnosis
Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of the late President John F. Kennedy, has died shortly after announcing she had a terminal cancer diagnosis, the JFK Library Foundation said Tuesday.
"Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts," read a message from her family on the institution's Instagram account, alongside an image of Schlossberg.
Schlossberg, 35, wrote in an essay published by The New Yorker last month that she had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in May 2024, shortly after the birth of her second child. She underwent grueling treatment, including chemotherapy, bone marrow transplants and a clinical trial for a type of immunotherapy, but the cancer returned and she was eventually given a prognosis of one year to live, she wrote.
Schlossberg was the second of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and Edwin Schlossberg's three children.
Caroline Kennedy was just 5 years old when her father, the president, was shot and killed in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Another tragedy struck the family when her younger brother, John F. Kennedy Jr., died in a small plane crash in 1999.
Tatiana Schlossberg published the essay announcing her diagnosis 62 years to the day after President Kennedy's assassination. She wrote that she struggled with the impact of her diagnosis on her family.
"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. 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 wrote.
Schlossberg married George Moran in September 2017. The pair met as undergraduates at Yale University, The New York Times reported, and wed in a ceremony at her family's home on Martha's Vineyard. They had two children, a son born in 2022 and a daughter born in May 2024.
She had a career as an environmental journalist and author. In 2020, her book "Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have," won the Society of Environmental Journalists' Rachel Carson Environment Book Award. The judging panel said its readers "will find solace, humor and a route to feeling empowered with possibilities for positive change."
Schlossberg said she had another project in mind before cancer derailed her plans.
"My plan, had I not gotten sick, was to write a book about the oceans — their destruction, but also the possibilities they offer," she wrote in her essay. "During treatment, I learned that one of my chemotherapy drugs, cytarabine, owes its existence to an ocean animal: a sponge that lives in the Caribbean Sea, Tectitethya crypta. This discovery was made by scientists at the University of California Berkeley, who first synthesized the drug in 1959, and who almost certainly relied on government funding, the very thing that Bobby" — her cousin, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — "has already cut."
After her diagnosis, she said she focused on spending time with her family — especially her young children.
"Mostly, I try to live and be with them now," she wrote. "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."
She is survived by her husband and children, her parents, her elder sister Rose and her younger brother Jack.