Tatiana Schlossberg, daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, and a granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy, announced Saturday that she is dying of cancer in a deeply personal essay published in the New Yorker magazine.
Schlossberg, 35, wrote that she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3 found in less than 2 percent of cases. Doctors discovered the cancer shortly after she gave birth to her second child, a girl, in May 2024.
“I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me," Schlossberg wrote. “I didn’t feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew.”
In the essay, Schlossberg chronicled her diagnosis and grueling treatment process. She has undergone two bone marrow transplants, multiple rounds of chemotherapy, and two clinical trials.
“During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe,” she wrote.
Schlossberg, an environmental journalist who covered climate change for The New York Times and has also contributed to The Boston Globe, is the second of three children of former US ambassador Kennedy and Schlossberg.
The Yale graduate married George Moran, a medical doctor, in September 2017 at her family’s summer estate on Martha’s Vineyard.
The couple now have two young children, and Schlossberg wrote that she worries about them forgetting their mom.
“For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry,” Schlossberg wrote. “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.”
Schlossberg’s essay, which comes on the 62nd anniversary of her grandfather’s assassination, adds to the long list of cancer-related tragedies that have affected the Kennedy family. In 1973, Edward Kennedy Jr. lost his right leg to osteosarcoma, a form of bone cancer. His father, Senator Ted Kennedy, died of brain cancer in 2009.
Her materal grandmother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, died from cancer in 1994 when Schlossberg was a child.
Schlossberg’s essay also touched on the unusually public political division roiling the nation’s best known Democratic family.
She described the experience of being treated while her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., ran for president and eventually took office as health secretary.
She called his race for president “mostly an embarrassment to me and the rest of my family” and said his nomination to the Department of Health and Human Services flied “in the face of logic and common sense.”
“Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky,” she wrote.
Kennedy’s skepticism of vaccines worried Schlossberg, she said, especially after a bone marrow transplant wiped her immune system. Cuts to mRNA vaccine research and funding for the National Institutes of Health imperiled clinical trials.
“I worried about funding for leukemia and bone-marrow research at Memorial Sloan Kettering,” the hospital where Schlossberg received her first bone marrow transplant, she wrote. “I worried about the trials that were my only shot at remission.”
Schlossberg’s sister, Rose, donated stem cells for her treatment. She thanked her parents and brother and sister for “raising my children and sitting in my various hospital rooms.”
Jack Schlossberg, her brother, recently announced his campaign for Congress. The 32-year-old is running for a House seat in New York’s 12th district, set to be vacated by longtime Democratic Representative Jerry Nadler.
If she hadn’t been diagnosed with cancer, Schlossberg said she planned to write a book about the power and destruction of the oceans. She likes to remind her son, born in 2022, that she was a writer.
“Since I’ve been sick, I remind him a lot, so that he will know that I was not just a sick person,” she wrote.
Katie Muchnick can be reached at katie.muchnick@globe.com.