Tatiana Schlossberg, 35, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and granddaughter of John F. Kennedy, revealed in an essay that she is battling acute myeloid leukemia, a rare and aggressive blood cancer. The diagnosis came in May 2024, shortly after the birth of her second child. She said, "I did not – could not – believe that they were talking about me… I wasn't sick. I didn't feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I know." She also wrote, "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," as reported by The New York Times.
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Schlossberg's essay – published on the anniversary of her grandfather's assassination – recalls the struggles of coping with the illness, expressing how her parents and siblings "have been raising my children and sitting in my various hospital rooms almost every day," while her doctor "has scoured every inch of the earth for more treatments for me. He knows I don't want to die, and he is trying to stop it." She reflected, "For my whole life, I have tried to be good… 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," The New York Times reported.
She went through chemotherapy, a bone-marrow transplant with stem cells from her sister Rose, and joined an immunotherapy trial led by her medical team. Schlossberg credited her husband, George Moran, for his support, saying, "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," according to The New York Times.
She criticized her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, calling him "an embarrassment" and expressing worry that his anti-vaccine stance and budget cuts to health research "could leave me to spend the rest of my life immunocompromised." Schlossberg wrote, "Suddenly, the health care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky," as reported by The New York Times.
Despite these frustrations, she wrote of her love for her two young children and the pain of possibly not seeing them grow up. "I remind my son often that I am a writer, so that he will know that I was not just a sick person." She described a moment with her son: "He hugged me, patted me on the back, and said, 'I hear you, buddy, I hear you,'" she wrote.
