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Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of 35th president of the United States John F. Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, is confirming the worst possible news — she has less than one year to live.
Tatiana, 35, wrote about her dire prognosis in The New Yorker in an essay in which she laments how the news is affecting her mom, Caroline Kennedy, 67, whose life has been shaped by the assassination of Kennedy’s father, the death from cancer of her mom at 64, and the 1999 plane-crash death of her 38-year-old brother JFK Jr., among other Kennedy tragedies.
Schlossberg writes in the piece that her first thought was, “This couldn’t be happening to me, to my family.”
The worst day of her life came on one of the best days — on May 25, 2024, when her daughter was born, her doctor detected an off-the-charts abnormal lack of white blood cells in Schlossberg’s tests. Right away, he said it might be leukemia.
Within hours, her medical team informed her they were reasonably sure it was leukemia.
“The diagnosis was acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3,” she writes. “It was mostly seen in older patients. Every doctor I saw asked me if I had spent a lot of time at Ground Zero, given how common blood cancers are among first responders. I was in New York on 9/11, in the sixth grade, but I didn’t visit the site until years later. I am not elderly — I had just turned 34”
She was told she would need chemo, a bone-marrow transplant, and more chemo.
“I did not — could not — believe that 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. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew. I regularly ran five to ten miles in Central Park,” she goes on. “I once swam three miles across the Hudson River — eerily, to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.”
In spite of all best efforts, which she documents in painful detail, her doctor currently believes she has less than a year to live.
Heartbreakingly, she writes of her mom, “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.”
Referencing what some have called “the Kennedy Curse,” she notes sadly, “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.”
Mourning her premature loss of her health and what she has accepted as the inevitable end of her story, Schlossberg, who married George Moran in 2017, bravely writes of her son, born in 2022, and her daughter, born in 2024, “I let the memories come and go. So many of them are from my childhood that I feel as if I’m watching myself and my kids grow up at the same time. 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.”
People magazine reports Schlossberg’s brother, Jack Schlossberg, took time out from his newly announced congressional campaign to share his sister’s words and to offer, “Life is short — let it rip.”
