Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of late President John F. Kennedy, revealed Saturday she has terminal cancer.
The 35-year-old scion of the Kennedy clan announced her diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia in an essay for The New Yorker.
Her doctors expect she may live for less than a year.
Schlossberg is the granddaughter of JFK. Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
Schlossberg’s condition was discovered after she gave birth to her daughter in May 2024. Her doctor saw something was amiss with her white blood cell count.
“A normal white-blood-cell count is around four to eleven thousand cells per microliter. Mine was a hundred and thirty-one thousand cells per microliter,” she wrote for the magazine.
“It could just be something related to pregnancy and delivery, the doctor said, or it could be leukemia,” she went on, adding that once she’d received her diagnosis, it quickly became clear “I could not be cured by a standard course.”
The journalist says it’s especially painful for her mother, Caroline Kennedy, to be losing a daughter after losing her father in one of the most famous assassinations in U.S. history. REUTERS/Kevin Mohatt
Schlossberg, daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, further spoke of the shock at learning she’d need to undergo several months of chemotherapy treatment, as well as receiving a bone-marrow transplant.
“I did not—could not—believe that they were talking about me,” she wrote. “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.”
The journalist and her husband, George Moran, a doctor, already had a three-year-old son by that stage.
“I had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I needed to take care of,” she said, detailing how she had to spend five weeks in the hospital after giving birth to their now one-year-old daughter before undergoing chemotherapy treatment at home.
Despite participating in clinical trials for a new form of immunotherapy, Schlossberg was told earlier this year she would not survive the disease.
“George did everything for me that he possibly could,” she said of the support she received from her husband. “He talked to all the doctors and the insurance people that I didn’t want to talk to; he slept on the floor of the hospital.”
She also expressed gratitude to her family for helping out during the ordeal.
“They have held my hand unflinchingly while I have suffered, trying not to show their pain and sadness in order to protect me from it,” she went on. “This has been a great gift, even though I feel their pain every day.”
Schlossberg further noted the news has been especially hard for her mother, who now faces losing a daughter after also losing her father, the former president, in one of the most famous assassinations in U.S. history.
“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 said.
