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Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of the 35th US president, John F Kennedy, died on Tuesday after revealing in November she had been diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. She was 35.
Her passing was announced in a social media post by the John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. “Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts,” the post said. It was signed “George, Edwin and Josephine Moran, Ed, Carolina, Jack, Rose and Rory”.
In a New Yorker essay published in November, Schlossberg said she had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia with a rare mutation, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow, and had less than a year to live.
Schlossberg, who graduated from Yale and had a master’s degree from Oxford, was previously a climate reporter for the New York Times, and had contributed to the Atlantic, the Washington Post and Vanity Fair.
The daughter of Caroline Kennedy, 67, and Edwin Schlossberg, 80, said she’d learned of her diagnosis shortly after giving birth to her second child with husband George Moran in May 2024 and had been undergoing treatment.
“I did not – could not – believe that they were talking about me,” Schlossberg wrote in the essay, titled A Battle With My Blood. “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.”
In the essay, the environmental writer addressed her cousin, Robert F Kennedy Jr, criticizing the influence his policies as secretary of health and human services had had on her experience with the illness.
Schlossberg wrote that she strongly disapproved of his anti-vaccine positions and his decisions to cut funding for medical research, emphasizing the harm such actions cause to patients like herself.
“As I spent more and more of my life under the care of doctors, nurses, and researchers striving to improve the lives of others, I watched as Bobby cut nearly a half billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers,” she wrote.
She said that Kennedy “slashed billions in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest sponsor of medical research; and threatened to oust the panel of medical experts charged with recommending preventive cancer screenings”.
Schlossberg added that doctors at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving medical center, where she was receiving care, were uncertain about their future after funding cuts initiated by the Trump administration.
“Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky,” Schlossberg wrote. The university later reached an agreement with the Trump administration that reinstated the funding.
She concluded her essay reflecting on her focus in the time she had left, writing that she hoped to “fill my brain with memories” of her children: “I try to live and be with them now. But being in the present is harder than it sounds, so I let the memories come and go … I will keep trying to remember.”
Schlossberg leaves behind a three-year-old son and a one-year-old daughter she shared with her husband.
