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Tatiana Schlossberg has penned a deeply personal and incredibly painful essay.
The 35-year-old daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg — and the cousin of Robert K. Kennedy — shared on Saturday that she has been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a rare blood cancer — with doctors giving her a terminal prognosis.
Writing for The New Yorker on November 22, Schlossberg explained that she learned of her disease hours after giving birth to her second baby with husband George Moran in May 2024, when her physician discovered that her white blood cell count was unusually high.
After being told of her diagnosis, the environmental journalist — who also shares 3-year-old Edwin Jr. with Moran — was told she would need months of chemotherapy as well as a bone-marrow transplant, confessing in her essay she had trouble processing the news.
“I did not—could not—believe that they were talking about me,” she wrote, adding:]“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.”
She continued:
“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.”
Elsewhere in this piece, Schlossberg says her cousin of a health secretary has become an “embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family,” largely due to his dangerous opinion on vaccines.
In January, Schlossberg embarked on a clinical trial of CAR-T-cell therapy, an immunotherapy meant to fight certain blood cancers. After numerous rounds of the trial, her doctor informed her that she likely has one year to live.
She said her husband has done everything anyone could possibly ask, going on about her loved ones and her situation:
“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.”
At another point, Schlossberg detailed her own feelings about her prognosis.
“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,” she said.
“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.”
