Tatiana Schlossberg, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy, disclosed Saturday that she has terminal cancer.
In an essay published by The New Yorker, Schlossberg, 35, announced she has acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3. She was diagnosed on May 25, 2024, on the same day her daughter was born.
A few hours after delivering her second child, Schlossberg said doctors discovered her white blood cell count was abnormally high, which ultimately led to her diagnosis.
She noted that she could not be cured by standard treatment, and that she faced months of chemotherapy, a bone marrow transplant and more chemo to keep the cancer from returning.
“I did not—could not—believe that they were talking about me,” Schlossberg wrote in the essay. “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.”
“This could not possibly be my life,” Schlossberg later added.
Schlossberg spent five weeks at Columbia-Presbyterian before her abnormal cell count improved enough, allowing her to undergo a round of treatment at her home.
She was also treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering, where she received a bone marrow transplant. However, she eventually relapsed, despite a new round of chemotherapy.
“My parents and my brother and sister, too, have been raising my children and sitting in my various hospital rooms almost every day for the last year and a half,” Schlossberg wrote.
“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 added. “This has been a great gift, even though I feel their pain every day.”
She continued: “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.”
In January, Schlossberg joined a clinical trial for CAR T-cell therapy, which is a type of immunotherapy that has helped fight against certain blood cancers, including leukemia.
“During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe,” Schlossberg wrote. “My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me.”
In her essay, Schlossberg also addressed concerns about access to medical care under the current presidential administration.
Throughout her CAR-T treatment, Schlossberg detailed that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., her cousin, was in the process of being nominated and confirmed to serve in President Donald Trump’s cabinet.
Schlossberg went on to sharply criticize Kennedy over what she described as his defiance of “logic and common sense” and his funding cuts to vaccine research since starting his role in February.
“Bobby is a known skeptic of vaccines, and I was especially concerned that I wouldn’t be able to get mine again, leaving me to spend the rest of my life immunocompromised, along with millions of cancer survivors, small children, and the elderly,” Schlossberg wrote.
Schlossberg, an environmental journalist and former municipal reporter for The Bergen Record, said she is now focusing on being present with her children.
“Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I’ll remember this forever, I’ll remember this when I’m dead,” Schlossberg said of her memories.
“Obviously, I won’t,” she wrote. “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.”
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