Caroline Kennedy‘s daughter Tatiana Schlossberg has died at age 35, five weeks after publishing an essay revealing she had a terminal form of leukemia, RadarOnline.com can reveal.
“Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts,” her family shared in an Instagram post, signed “George, Edwin, and Josephine Moran,” who are Schlossberg’s husband and two children. In addition, it was signed by her father, mother, and two siblings, “Ed, Caroline, Jack, Rose, and Rory,” while showing a smiling Tatiana looking out to sea.
Heartbreaking Diagnosis
Tatiana revealed the spread of her disease in a November 22 New Yorker essay titled The Battle With My Blood, causing some to say the infamous Kennedy curse was alive and well to strike someone so young.
The Yale and Oxford-educated journalist heartbreakingly described how shortly after giving birth to her daughter in May 2024, “my doctor noticed that my blood count looked strange.”
Tatiana’s white-blood-cell count was dangerously high, and her doctor told her, “It could just be something related to pregnancy and delivery, or it could be leukemia,” as she and her husband were in disbelief that it could be cancer.
She was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare Inversion 3 mutation. The type of blood cancer is typically found in much older patients.
Bone Marrow Transplant
Tatiana described herself as “actually one of the healthiest people I knew,” swimming a mile in the pool the day before giving birth and regularly running up to 10 miles in New York’s Central Park.
“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,” she recalled, referring to then-two-year-old son Edwin and her daughter Josephine.
After Tatiana underwent at-home chemotherapy, her sister, Rose, 37, and brother, Jack, 32, were tested to find out if they would be matches for a bone marrow transplant. Rose was able to give her sibling healthy blood-forming stem cells.
The transplant put Tatiana’s cancer in remission, and she began another round of chemotherapy before it returned. Another transplant from an unrelated donor failed to keep the cancer at bay.
Heartbreak Over Her Young Children
After learning she had at most a year to live, Tatiana’s thoughts turned to her two young children, whom she wouldn’t get to watch grow up.
“My son might have a few memories, but he’ll probably start confusing them with pictures he sees or stories he hears,” she wrote of her little boy.
“I didn’t ever really get to take care of my daughter,” she confessed about the child whose birth led to Tatiana finding out she had leukemia.
She shared, “I couldn’t change her diaper or give her a bath or feed her, all because of the risk of infection after my transplants. I was gone for almost half of her first year of life. I don’t know who, really, she thinks I am, and whether she will feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother.”
Kennedy Curse Strikes Again
Tatiana discussed how her cancer had become the latest tragedy to hit her famous family.
Her grandfather, the late President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in November 2023. His namesake son and Tatiana’s uncle, John F. Kennedy Jr., died when the small plane he was piloting crashed off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard in July 1999, killing him, his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her sister, Lauren Bessette.
“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 wrote about her terminal cancer. “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.”
Caroline Kennedy’s Daughter Tatiana Schlossberg, 35, Reveals Terminal Cancer Diagnosis
The daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg has been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia
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NEED TO KNOW
- Tatiana Schlossberg has terminal cancer
- The daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg revealed the news in an essay published by The New Yorker on Nov. 22
- Schlossberg was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, and doctors told her she has less than a year to live
Tatiana Schlossberg has terminal cancer.
The 35-year-old daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg revealed in an essay published by The New Yorker on Saturday, Nov. 22, that she has been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia.
Schlossberg said that she learned she had the disease after giving birth to her second baby in May 2024, after her doctor noticed an imbalance in her white blood cell count.
“A few hours later, my doctor noticed that my blood count looked strange. A normal white-blood-cell count is around four to eleven thousand cells per microliter. Mine was a hundred and thirty-one thousand cells per microliter,” she wrote.
“It could just be something related to pregnancy and delivery, the doctor said, or it could be leukemia,” she further recalled, adding that she was eventually diagnosed with “a rare mutation called Inversion 3.”
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Writing about her treatment options, Schlossberg said, “I could not be cured by a standard course.”
Adding that she was initially told she would need months of chemotherapy and a bone-marrow transplant, she continued, “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 had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I needed to take care of,” Schlossberg then said. (She and husband George Moran, who tied the knot in 2017, share a 3-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter.)
Schlossberg eventually spent five weeks at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital after giving birth to her daughter. She was then transferred to Memorial Sloan Kettering for a bone-marrow transplant, and she underwent chemotherapy at home.
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In January, Schlossberg joined a clinical trial of CAR-T-cell therapy, a type of immunotherapy against certain blood cancers. She was eventually told by her doctor that she had a year left to live.
Schlossberg praised her husband for his support throughout the ordeal in her essay. “George did everything for me that he possibly could. He talked to all the doctors and insurance people that I didn’t want to talk to; he slept on the floor of the hospital,” she said.
“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,” continued Schlossberg. “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.”
“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 added. (Schlossberg’s siblings include sister Rose Schlossberg and brother Jack Schlossberg.)
“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,” said the mom of two.
As for her own family, Schlossberg wrote, “Mostly, I 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.”
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