Environmental journalist Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of former President John F. Kennedy, died Tuesday, a month after revealing in an essay that she had been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. Schlossberg was 35.
The death of the journalist was announced on Instagram by the John F Kennedy Library Foundation, but did not reveal the details of where she passed.
As tributes poured in, netizens remembered Schlossberg’s harrowing essay and the journalist’s courage and honesty in describing her battle with the terminal illness.
The essay, titled ‘A Battle With My Blood’, was published by The New Yorker on November 22, the 62nd anniversary of JFK’s assassination.
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Tatiana Schlossberg’s fight with cancer
In her essay, Schlossberg revealed that she learned about her cancer after the birth of her daughter in May 2024.
Recounting her diagnosis, Schlossberg wrote, “My husband, George, and I held her and stared at her, admiring her newness. A few hours later, my doctor noticed that my blood count looked strange. A normal white blood cell count is about four thousand to eleven thousand cells per microliter. Mine was one hundred and thirty one thousand cells per microliter. It could just be something related to pregnancy, leukemia, childbirth.”
Schlossberg told her husband in disbelief that it couldn’t be leukemia, but hours later doctors confirmed she was dying.
The journalist recounted in excruciating detail how a moment of joy quickly turned into a spiral of gloom – “My daughter was taken to daycare. 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 she was taken away.”
Schlossberg further revealed that she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia with a rare mutation called Inversion 3.
“I could not be cured with standard treatment. I would need at least several months of chemotherapy aimed at reducing the number of blast cells in my bone marrow,” Schlossberg wrote.
“I couldn’t – believe they were talking about me. I had swum a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. In fact, I was one of the healthiest people I knew,” the journalist wrote, describing her disbelief, adding: “This couldn’t possibly be my life.”
She recalled trying to find “humor” in the situation – “I didn’t know what else to do.”
“I decided that everyone in the hospital had Munchausen Syndrome by proxy, and I was their target. It was a joke that I thought was funnier than everyone else. Later, when I was bald and had a scratch on my face from the fall, my joke was that I was a broken Voldemort,” Schlossberg wrote.
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She also described the “humiliation and humiliation”, including how she nearly bled to death after suffering a postpartum haemorrhage.
Schlossberg also heaped praise on her nurses and her family, who did everything they could to give her a sense of normalcy: “My son came to visit almost every day. When friends heard I liked Spindrift seltzer, they sent it; they also sent pajamas and sets of watercolors and good gossip,” the journalist wrote.
“The nurses brought me warm blankets and let me sit on the horizon floor with my son, even though I wasn’t supposed to leave my room. They ate up the gossip I gathered; they looked away when they saw I had a smuggled kettle and toaster. They told me about their children, their dating lives and their first trips to Europe, who are more able and able. empathetic, more willing to serve others than nurses,” she added.
Schlossberg also described how her sister Rose donated her cells for a stem cell transplant, a last-ditch attempt to cure her.
However, after the transplant, while undergoing chemotherapy, her hair fell out. When Schlossberg began wearing scarves to cover her bare hearing, her son and brother Jack joined in a gesture of solidarity.
The journalist recalled the pain that she could not fully take care of her newborn daughter due to the risk of infection.
“I don’t know who she really thinks I am,” Schlossberg wrote, airing doubts about “whether she will feel or remember when I’m gone that I’m her mother.”
Although Schlossberg briefly went into remission, she relapsed and the cycle continued: blood transfusions, more stem cell transplants, and more chemotherapy. Remission, then relapse.
“During the last clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for maybe a year. My first thought was that my children, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, would not remember me,” Schlossberg painfully recalled.
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She also described the pain a “new tragedy” had added to her mother Caroline Kennedy’s life.
“All my life I’ve 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 angry or angry. Now I’ve added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it,” Schlossberg wrote.
The journalist also recalled how difficult it was to try to live a normal life when she knew she was going to die.
“I mostly try to live and be with them now. But being in the present is harder than it sounds, so I let the memories come and go,” Schlossberg wrote.
“So many of them are from my childhood that I feel like I’m watching myself and my children grow up at the same time. Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I’ll remember it forever, I’ll remember it when I’m dead. Of course I won’t. But since I don’t know what death is, and there’s no one to tell me what comes after it, I’ll keep trying to pretend,” she concluded.
Born on May 5, 1990, Schlossberg was the middle child of JFK’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy, and Edwin Schlossberg, a digital designer.
She studied history at Yale University and completed her postgraduate studies at Oxford in 2014.
After completing her education, Schlossberg went on to work for The New York Times and wrote for several other renowned publications, including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and Bloomberg News.
In 2019, she also published a book called Stealth Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Didn’t Know You Had.
