Tragedy has struck the Kennedy’s – affectionately known as “America’s royal family” –
again with JFK’s 35-year-old granddaughter given less than a year to live.
Tatiana Schlossberg, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, revealed she has terminal cancer, in an essay published by The New Yorker on Saturday.
Ms Schlossberg said she was diagnosed with incurable acute myeloid leukaemia after giving birth to her second baby in May 2024.
“Maybe my brain is replaying my life now because I have a terminal diagnosis, and all these memories will be lost,” wrote.
“A few hours (after delivering my baby), my doctor noticed that my blood count looked strange. A normal white-blood-cell count is around four to eleven thousand cells per microlitre. Mine was a hundred and thirty-one thousand cells per microlitre,” she wrote.
“It could just be something related to pregnancy and delivery, the doctor said, or it could be leukaemia,” she further recalled, adding that she was eventually diagnosed with “a rare mutation called Inversion 3.”
“I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me. 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,” she continued.
“I had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I needed to take care of.”
She has spent much of the time since in treatment, receiving a bone-marrow transplant, chemotherapy, and blood transfusions. In January, Schlossberg joined a clinical trial of CAR-T-cell therapy, a type of immunotherapy against certain blood cancers. However, she has since been told by her doctors that she has less than 12 months to live.
Ms Schlossberg, who graduated from Yale and has a Master’s degree from Oxford, previously worked as a journalist at The New York Times and published her first book in 2019.
She 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.
In The New Yorker essay, the young mum agonisingly described the prospect of her children growing up without memories of her.
“My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me,” she writes.
“My son might have a few memories, but he’ll probably start confusing them with pictures he sees or stories he hears. I didn’t ever really get to take care of my daughter—I couldn’t change her diaper or give her a bath or feed her.
Ms Schlossberg is the second of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg’s three children.
She has an older sister, Rose, 37, and a younger brother, Jack, 32, who is running for Congress in the 12th Congressional District being vacated by Manhattan Rep. Jerold Nadler (D-NY).
In a New York Times profile published earlier this month, Jack revealed he had shaved his hair “in solidarity with someone close to him who is sick.”
In The New Yorker essay, Ms Schlossberg writes that her family has been helping to raise her two young children amid her treatment, and describes the heartbreak of adding further tragedy to her mother’s already turbulent life.
“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 states. “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.”
Ms Schlossberg’s article was published on Nov. 22 – the 62nd anniversary of her grandfather’s 1963 assassination.
Indeed, Caroline Kennedy’s life has been full of tragedy.
Her uncle, Ambassador Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated in 1968, less than five years after her father’s death.
Her mother, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, died in 1994 at the age of 64 following a short battle with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which spread to her spinal cord, brain, and liver.
Her older brother, John F. Kennedy, Jr., died in 1999 at age 38 in a plane crash that also killed her sister-in-law, Caroline Bessette Kennedy, 33.
Tatiana Schlossberg had served as a flower girl at their 1996 wedding.
– With The NY Post
Read related topics:Queen Elizabeth II
