Tatiana Schlossberg — daughter of Caroline Kennedy and granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy — has revealed she’s facing terminal cancer.
In a moving personal essay for The New Yorker titled “A Battle with My Blood,” the 35-year-old writer shared that she was diagnosed shortly after welcoming her daughter in May 2024. Schlossberg and her husband, George Moran, also have a son who is now three.
She explained that during postnatal lab work, doctors noticed something was seriously off. “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.
“At first, It could just be something related to pregnancy and delivery, the doctor said, or it could be leukemia,” Schlossberg recalled. Tests later confirmed she had acute myeloid leukemia, along with a rare mutation known as Inversion 3.
Because of this mutation, standard treatment wasn’t enough. “I could not be cured by a standard course of treatment,” she explained, outlining a grueling plan that involved months of chemotherapy, a bone marrow transplant, and additional ongoing chemo to lower the chances of relapse.
Her older sister, Rose, turned out to be a donor match and provided stem cells for the transplant. The procedure initially worked and put Schlossberg in remission — but the cancer returned. Her doctor warned her that her particular mutation “liked to come back.”
Schlossberg has participated in several clinical trials in hopes of tackling the disease. Still, she shared that “during the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe.”
In her essay, she also referenced political decisions made by her mother’s cousin, U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., criticizing his move to cut major vaccine research funding. “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 ended by expressing deep gratitude for her family’s constant support. “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.”
“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. This has been a great gift, even though I feel their pain every day.”