I avoided reading Tatiana Schlossberg’s New Yorker article for as long as I could, just because I knew it would be a gut-punch. It was. Tatiana is the 35-year-old daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg. She is one of the three grandchildren of John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy. Tatiana has one brother (Jack) and one sister (Rose). She is married to a doctor, George Moran, and last year, she gave birth to their second child. Just days after she gave birth, she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. In the past year and a half, she’s tried a million different treatments, but she is now terminal. She wrote about all of this in an essay called “A Battle with My Blood.”
On May 25, 2024, my daughter was born at seven-oh-five in the morning, ten minutes after I arrived at Columbia-Presbyterian hospital, in New York. My husband, George, and I held her and stared at her and admired her newness. A few hours later, 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. It could just be something related to pregnancy and delivery, the doctor said, or it could be leukemia. “It’s not leukemia,” I told George. “What are they talking about?”
George, who was then a urology resident at the hospital, began calling friends who were primary-care doctors and ob-gyns. Everyone thought it was something to do with the pregnancy or the delivery. After a few hours, my doctors thought it was leukemia. My parents, Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, had brought my two-year-old son to the hospital to meet his sister, but suddenly I was being moved to another floor. My daughter was carried off to the nursery. My son didn’t want to leave; he wanted to drive my hospital bed like a bus. I said goodbye to him and my parents and was wheeled away.
The diagnosis was acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3. It was mostly seen in older patients. Every doctor I saw asked me if I had spent a lot of time at Ground Zero, given how common blood cancers are among first responders. I was in New York on 9/11, in the sixth grade, but I didn’t visit the site until years later. I am not elderly—I had just turned thirty-four.
…George did everything for me that he possibly could. He talked to all the doctors and insurance people that I didn’t want to talk to; he slept on the floor of the hospital; he didn’t get mad when I was raging on steroids and yelled at him that I did not like Schweppes ginger ale, only Canada Dry. He would go home to put our kids to bed and come back to bring me dinner. I know that not everyone can be married to a doctor, but, if you can, it’s a very good idea. He is perfect, and I feel so cheated and so sad that I don’t get to keep living the wonderful life I had with this kind, funny, handsome genius I managed to find.
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. 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.
That’s when I started to lose it, and I’m crying even now – Tatiana thinking about what this is doing to her mother Caroline. Caroline, who lost her father at such a young age, and lost her brother nearly 30 years ago. Caroline having to step in and take care of her daughter’s babies because Tatiana has an aggressive form of leukemia. This poor family. The Kennedy curse is a real thing, I just hoped it would never hit Caroline’s children.
Tatiana devotes a good-sized chunk of her essay to her cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and how he’s destroying Health and Human Services, how he’s harming the American medical field and destroying government funding into life-saving technology, medicine and vaccines. She’s putting a human face on the cost of Trumpism and the very real things RFK Jr. has already done to harm and kill Americans.
Tatiana Schlossberg, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy, had just given birth when she was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. She writes about her fear of adding another tragedy to her family’s life. https://t.co/GR1vSZYmsW pic.twitter.com/NdTNuS0Acl
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) November 23, 2025
Screencaps courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Library video.
Devastating. How much can one family take??
Junior would still be around if he weren’t such an overconfident ass.
Some things, out of respect for the family, you don’t say after a person has died. This comment is one of them.
Lord have mercy
I’m devastated for her, her children, her husband, and her mother who has had so much tragedy in her life.
I cannot imagine helping to raise your children’s children specifically because your child is no longer here. The beautiful fun moments? They aren’t there to see it. The hard moments? They need their mom/ dad but they can’t have them. And the moments where something they do perfectly encapsulates their parent and both breaks and heals your heart? That’s a truly heart breaking kind of pain I hope no one ever has to experience again.
So many people have done this, for so many generations of humans. The things humans endure are incomprehensible.
Gut wrenching situation. She’s so young, so talented, that it will be a great loss to the world if she succumbs to the cancer. I say “if” because I truly hope that she can still survive.
I broke down in tears as well.
I think of these young babies that will learn about their mother through others, of Tatiana who cannot feed or change her daughter’s diaper for fear of catching the stray germ, of Caroline—who has withstood so much tragedy—it’s beyond sad, beyond heartbreaking.
I pray for this family, and hope that Tatiana’s words cause those in DC to rethink having RFK, Jr in control of the health of our nation.
It’s the very best part of being Kennedy that she is taking this unbearable tragedy and using her “moment of fame” to try to help this ailing country by calling out her cousin.
this exactly – I admire her so much for using her voice this way, even at her lowest point.
Fuck the abject stupidity and hate of Bobby and all his evil cohorts dismantling medical research and medical access to save the lives of millions. There is no hell hot enough for them
Yes. That was heartbreaking to read—unfathomably more so to experience, I am sure–but it was so well-written & so necessary at this particular time to exemplify what these seriously bad decisions are doing to all of us Americans.
The essay is so heartbreaking. Poor Tatiana and also poor Carolyn, after all the tragedies she has had to endure in her life now the greatest of all awaits her.
Caroline s siblings all passed on her older sister arabella was still born . Her brothers Patrick and john are deceased. Now the tragic news aboit Tatiana. All the terrible things she went through
I read something as 💔 & brave as the essay above…& it feels like I will start to 😢 & never…EVA…stop😭
So tragic for the family. So devastating
This is completely tragic. She is a true Profile in Courage.
Gut punch is exactly right. I tear up every time I read even just a fragment of her essay.
The tears. How sad this mother won’t be able to raise her children and her children at such a young age won’t have clear memories of her.
I heard from Maria Shriver that in their family, they try to help the world be better, that is just the way they are. In this moment, taking time to call out RFK is a very noble thing. I wish a miracle heals her.
Absolutely devastating. The part about trying to protect her mother from one more tragedy is just heartbreaking.
In addition to all the things people have said, I thought the piece was a stunning direct rebuke of Bobby (and that’s what she called him the whole time, not “RFK”) but also an unintentional rebuke of the the odious, self centered, morally corrupt Nuzzi book and life she’s led. Devoid of meaning or growth.
I read this over the weekend and was absolutely heartbroken for Tatiana and her family. Her sadness that her children won’t remember her is so hard to think about as a parent of a little one.
She was in my grade at school. I never thought I’d see something like this randomly browsing this website. This is so so sad.
Oh my gosh. What an absolute tragedy. This is such a visceral fear, especially for mothers.
when you become a mom and think about death – yes you think about all of the things you would miss and it’s soul destroying.
But thinking about all the times your children will need you or need comfort and love and safety and support and you not being there to give them everything they need, to protect them, to just have them know that someone will always there for them, knowing that your death will cause them pain and sorrow in so many ways that you can’t even fully begin to imagine and the trauma…. And of course you won’t be there to help them through it. Cancer is so cruel.
I hope she gets a miracle. I hope everyone who brings love to the world gets the miracles they need too.
I lost my friend to colon cancer earlier this year. She was diagnosed with advanced metastatic colon cancer just weeks after the birth of her second child. The rise in cancers in young people, especially women, is alarming and tragic. My heart aches for these young families.
It’s covid. Covid is basically a carcinogen.
I’m so sorry for your loss.
I’m crying. I’m an “old mom”, and I often worry that I won’t be around when my kids need me. My daughter is ten months old now, and I am making a scrapbook style baby book where I add “your mom’s advice” section regarding any of the challenges that we went through that month, in case I’m not around when she has kids and needs this type of advice. This poor woman KNOWS she won’t be around. I’m devastated for her. How do you fit a lifetime of memories and advice into a year? Two years? And her poor mother…my God, that poor family.
Oh my goodness. What a sweet and incredible gift for your child.
I wept, too, as I read this over the weekend.
She writes about the memories of her own childhood that keep coming to her, even as knows her children won’t remember much, if anything, about her.
The cruelty of cancer, compounded by her own cousin Bobby’s cruel budget cuts, is just heartrending.
Why do the best people, even the best Kennedys, die as the terrible ones live forever?
While I pray that her doctors find the magic bullet to add decades to her life, I remain deeply impressed at what she has endured so far. Donor cell stem cell transplants and car-t cell therapy is difficult, risky and rife with horrible side effects. When I’ve been in the hospital bone marrow transplant unit, I marvel at the courage and strength and HOPE and endurance the donor patients exude. And she is enduring this all while knowing/witnessing the sadness her departure will cause to her family and children, which is an additional stressor. As someone in the trenches near her, I will be forever grateful that she shared her private story in an effort to get her idiot cousin to re-think his policies. To go public when she really didn’t need to, is an act of supreme generosity and courage and I want to underline that thricely. From her blood cancer sisterhood, we are all cheering her name indefinitely and loudly.
The family has seen a lot of devastating loss. It’s so sad and traumatic. Caroline is the last one remaining in her immediate family. To lose your father and brother unexpectedly and watch your mother and daughter slowly decline from a disease, is overwhelming. My heart breaks for her.
And add to that Caroline’s cousin Anthony Radziwill who she was very close with and who passed from cancer in his 30s. So much loss!
This essay is a public service. Since Covid, we are seeing an uptick in cancers, especially among younger people. This is not going to get better, until we acknowledge the risk and start taking Covid transmission seriously.
She’s a very brave lady. Wish her cousin Bobby had some of that.
I admire her enormously. I used to read her pieces in the NYT, her sub-stack, and her book, “Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have” (2019). I was struck by her strong writing and her persuasive analysis on the environment. I highly recommend it. She did deep investigative journalism and I don’t believe she traded on the Kennedy name. I enjoyed her sense of humor. And now, the joy she finds in small things remains impressive, as when she writes about her son: ”
When I look at him, I try to fill my brain with memories. How many more times can I watch the video of him trying to say “Anna Karenina”? What about when I told him I didn’t want ice cream from the ice-cream truck, and he hugged me, patted me on the back, and said, “I hear you, buddy, I hear you”? I think about the first time I came home from the hospital. He walked into my bathroom, looked at me, and said, “It’s so nice to meet you in here.”
I, too, hear her, buddy.
Caroline also lost her mother, Jackie Onassis, to Hodgkin’s Lymphona, when Jackie was only 64. Don’t know if Tatiana can remember her. Then Caroline lost her brother John Jr, and sister-in-law in a plane crash. Sounds like she’s keeping strong and doing everything she can for her daughter.
Such a tragic story. I can’t find the words to say any more.
It’s hard-breaking for everyone in the family, but especially the children- and especially the little baby girl who will not grow up with having known her remarkable mother for even a little while.
Utterly heartbreaking. I feel for Caroline, who will someday have to look at her grandchildren and say “I know exactly how you feel” about growing up without a parent.