Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy, said she is battling terminal cancer, revealing in a deeply personal essay that her doctors estimate she has less than a year to live.
Schlossberg, 35, shared the news in The New Yorker, writing that she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia shortly after giving birth to her daughter in May 2024. Her medical team identified a rare genetic abnormality known as Inversion 3, an aggressive mutation associated with poor treatment outcomes.
“I did not—could not—believe that they were talking about me,” she wrote, describing how the illness was detected just hours after her daughter’s delivery, when routine bloodwork revealed a dangerously elevated white-blood-cell count.
Over the past 18 months, Schlossberg has undergone extensive treatment, including several rounds of chemotherapy, a bone-marrow transplant, and participation in multiple clinical trials. Her older sister, Rose, served as her stem-cell donor. Despite periods of remission, the cancer repeatedly returned.
“During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe,” she wrote.
“My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me.”
A writer and journalist, Schlossberg previously covered climate and environmental issues for The New York Times and published a book in 2019. She has been married to Dr. George Moran since 2017. The couple share two young children, a son born in 2022 and a daughter born last year.
In the essay, she reflected on the support she has received from her parents, former U.S. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, designer Edwin Schlossberg, and her siblings.
“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,” she wrote.
The diagnosis adds another painful chapter to a family marked by public service and profound loss.
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, followed by the 1968 assassination of his brother, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. Schlossberg also noted the deaths of other close relatives, including her uncle John F. Kennedy Jr. in a 1999 plane crash and her grandmother Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who died of cancer in 1994.
For now, Schlossberg wrote, her focus is on spending time with her children and preserving memories with them for as long as she is able.
“Mostly I try to live and be with them now,” she wrote.
“Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I’ll remember this forever, I’ll remember this when I’m dead. Obviously, I won’t. 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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