Tatiana Schlossberg
On May 25, 2024, Tatiana Schlossberg, the 34-year-old granddaughter of John F Kennedy, entered the Columbia- Presbyterian hospital in New York to give birth to her second child. It was far from the joyous occasion that she and her family had anticipated.
The baby girl, named May, was born at 7.05am. A few hours later, Schlossberg’s doctors noticed that she had an abnormal blood count. Their initial hopes that it was something to do with the pregnancy were dashed when she was diagnosed with a rare mutation of acute myeloid leukaemia.
“I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me,” Schlossberg, an environmental journalist, recalled in a moving article that she wrote for The New Yorker magazine 18 months later, in which she announced that she was dying.
“I had swum a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew. I regularly ran five to ten miles in Central Park. I once swam three miles across the Hudson — eerily, to raise money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.”
Schlossberg’s mother was Caroline Kennedy, the former US ambassador to Australia and Japan whose father — America’s 35th president — had been assassinated in 1963. Her mother’s uncle, Robert F Kennedy, had also been assassinated while he was running for president in 1968. Her brother, John Kennedy Jr, had been killed with his wife, Carolyn, in a plane crash in 1999.
The ill fortune of the Kennedys had struck the family again, and Schlossberg was acutely aware of that. “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,” she 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.”
Tatiana Celia Kennedy Schlossberg was born in New York in 1990, the daughter of Caroline and Edwin Schlossberg, an artist and designer. Her mother was Roman Catholic, her father Jewish. She was raised in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a few blocks from her grandmother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma when she was four. She was educated at the private Brearley and Trinity schools in New York before earning a history degree at Yale where she edited the Yale Herald. She then studied for a master’s degree in American history at Oxford University.
While in the UK she attended a wreath-laying ceremony at the memorial to her grandfather in Runnymede, Surrey. “We have come here today to honour his memory — as this monument does so well — but today is a difficult day because it is a reminder of a moment of profound sadness for my family, for America and for the world,” she said.
Back in the US she trained as a journalist — first at the local paper on Martha’s Vineyard, not far from the Kennedy family’s compound at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and then at The Record in Bergen County, New Jersey, just north of New York City. “I covered everything from doughnut wars and stolen puppies to lives changed by gun violence and Hurricane Sandy,” she recalled.
She was taken on as a reporter on The New York Times’s metro section in 2014 and that year wrote a story about the discovery of a dead bear cub in Central Park. A decade later her cousin, Robert F Kennedy Jr, son of the assassinated former attorney-general Robert F Kennedy, was running for president. He admitted that he had collected the cub after it was hit by a car and dumped it in the park. “I had no idea who was responsible for this when I wrote the story,” Schlossberg said.
She went on to become a science and climate reporter before leaving The New York Times in 2017. That same year she married George Moran, a doctor she had met at Yale, and five years after that their first child, Edwin, was born.
Schlossberg worked as a freelance journalist, writing about environmental issues. She generally kept a low profile and avoided social media. In 2019 she published her first book, Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have, which explored the unseen environmental costs of the internet, technology, food, fashion and fuel. She also launched a newsletter, News from a Changing Planet. Of her own lifestyle, she said: “I make a much bigger effort to go to the farmers’ market. I don’t ever take a plastic produce bag at the grocery store. I really like to keep the clothes I have and wear them out. I offset my travel when I fly.”
Then, in May 2024, when her life seemed so full of promise, she received her devastating diagnosis.
Schlossberg spent the next 19 months battling the disease. She endured many months of chemotherapy, bone marrow transplants and experimental immunotherapy, spending long periods in Columbia-Presbyterian and Memorial Sloan Kettering hospitals. She had remissions and relapses, but nothing could beat the cancer.
President Trump’s appointment of Robert F Kennedy Jr, an antivaxxer and conspiracy theorist, as health secretary compounded her anguish.
“I watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health or the government,” she wrote in the New Yorker article, which was entitled “A Battle with My Blood” and published on the 62nd anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination.
“As I spent more and more of my life under the care of doctors, nurses and researchers striving to improve the lives of others, I watched as Bobby cut nearly half a billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers; slashed billions in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest sponsor of medical research; and threatened to oust the panel of medical experts charged with recommending preventative cancer screenings,” she wrote.
Kennedy was “an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family”.
Of her own condition, she wrote: “I feel so cheated and so sad that I don’t get to keep living the wonderful life I had.”
Tatiana Schlossberg, environmental writer and granddaughter of John F Kennedy, was born on May 5, 1990. She died of acute myeloid leukaemia on December 30, 2025, aged 35
No comments:
Post a Comment