Tatiana Schlossberg, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and the granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy, died Tuesday morning, her family said.
“Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning,” her family wrote in a a statement posted by the JFK Library Foundation. “She will always be in our hearts.”
Schlossberg, 35, received a terminal cancer diagnosis shortly after giving birth to her second child in May 2024. The cancer, acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3 was found in less than 2 percent of cases.
She revealed the diagnosis in a a deeply personal essay published in the New Yorker magazine last month.
“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 was the second of three children of Caroline Kennedy, a former US ambassador, and artist and designer Edwin Schlossberg. She was an environmental journalist who covered climate change for The New York Times and also contributed to The Boston Globe.
A graduate of Yale University, she married George Moran, a medical doctor, in September 2017 at her family’s property in Aquinnah on Martha’s Vineyard.
She leaves behind her husband and their two children, Edwin and Josephine, as well as her parents and her siblings, Rose and Jack Schlossberg.
Several figures in the media and environmental world praised Schlossberg’s legacy on Tuesday. Nicholas Burns, a former diplomat and Harvard professor, posted on X that Schlossberg was a “brilliant and dedicated environmental journalist” and “courageous to the end,” while CNN’s Jake Tapper wrote simply, “RIP Tatiana Schlossberg. So sad.”
“Her journalism lifted up the work of so many in the climate movement—including my own — and I hope her children grow up to learn what an extraordinary writer, citizen, and leader she was," wrote Nathaniel Stinnett, head of the Environmental Voter Project.
In her New Yorker essay, Schlossberg wrote that she was first told she might have leukemia just hours after giving birth to her daughter.
“I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me," she wrote, adding “I had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I needed to take care of. This could not possibly be my life.”
Schlossberg detailed her months of chemotherapy, a postpartum hemorrhage, from which she almost bled to death, and a bone-marrow transplant. She described receiving stem cell donations from her sister and a clinical trial for a new type of immunotherapy.
She also described her fear that her children would struggle to remember her.
“I don’t know who, really, she thinks I am, and whether she will feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother,” she wrote of her newborn daughter.
Schlossberg also expressed concern over her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a health science skeptic, whose presidential campaign and eventual appointment as health secretary was deeply controversial within the family.
“I worried about funding for leukemia and bone-marrow research at Memorial Sloan Kettering,” she wrote, referring to the hospital where she received her first bone marrow transplant. “I worried about the trials that were my only shot at remission.”
Travis Andersen of the Globe Staff contributed.
Camilo Fonseca can be reached at camilo.fonseca@globe.com. Follow him on X @fonseca_esq and on Instagram @camilo_fonseca.reports.