Caroline Kennedy’s daughter Tatiana Schlossberg has been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
The mother of two, 35, revealed her diagnosis in an essay published by The New Yorker on Saturday, November 22. She is battling acute myeloid leukemia and has been given a year to live.
Tatiana, whom Kennedy, 67, shares with her husband Edwin Schlossberg, learned of her diagnosis after giving birth to her second baby in May 2024. Her doctor noticed an imbalance in her white blood cell count, first assuming it was related to pregnancy and delivery before discovering she has “a rare mutation called Inversion 3.”
The environmental journalist was told she would not be “cured by a standard course” of treatment, after she was first told she’d need to endure months of chemotherapy and receive a bone-marrow transplant.
“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,” Tatiana wrote in The New Yorker. “I had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I needed to take care of.”
She and husband George Moran, who tied the knot in 2017, share a 3-year-old son and 18-month-old daughter.
Tatiana praised her husband for his unrelenting support, saying, “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; he didn’t get mad when I was raging on steroids and yelled at him that I did not like Schweppes ginger ale, only Canada Dry. He would go home to put our kids to bed and come back to bring me dinner.”
She added, “I know that not everyone can be married to a doctor, but, if you can, it’s a very good idea. He is perfect, and I feel so cheated and so sad that I don’t get to keep living the wonderful life I had with this kind, funny, handsome genius I managed to find.”
Prince William tours the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum with US Ambassador to Australia, Caroline Kennedy, Jack Kennedy Schlossberg (2nd L) and Tatiana Kennedy Schlossberg in Boston, Massachusetts, December 2, 2022. Matt Stone / POOL / AFP) (Photo by MATT STONE/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
After giving birth to her daughter, Tatiana spent five weeks at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital and was transferred to Memorial Sloan Kettering for a bone-marrow transplant. She also underwent chemotherapy at home.
In January, she joined a clinical trial of CAR-T-cell therapy, a type of immunotherapy against certain blood cancers, but was eventually made aware of her life expectancy.
“My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me,” she said of learning of her terminal diagnosis. “My son might have a few memories, but he’ll probably start confusing them with pictures he sees or stories he hears. I didn’t ever really get to take care of my daughter — 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.”
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Tatiana shared that her parents and siblings, sister Rose, 37, and brother Jack, 32, have been by her side to help care for her children.
“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,” Tatiana shared.
She also opened up about the immense grief she feels for her family, especially her mother, whom she has always tried to “protect” and “never make upset or angry.”
“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,” she wrote.
