Caroline Kennedy’s daughter reveals terminal cancer diagnosis
Caroline Kennedy’s daughter Tatiana Schlossberg wrote that she learned she had acute myeloid leukemia after giving birth in May 2024.
She was 35 years old.
She was the mother of two young children. She was married to a urologist. She is an environmental journalist who has written for the New York Times and for the New Yorker about the terminal cancer diagnosis that took her life. She was a member of one of America’s most storied political families and a successor to President John F. Kennedy.
The John F. Kennedy Library Foundation announced the death of Tatiana Schlossberg, Caroline Kennedy’s middle child, on December 30th. The cause of death was acute myeloid leukemia, a rare cancer of the blood and bone marrow.
The tragic circumstances of her death didn’t stop her from becoming tabloid fodder.
Hours after her death was announced, the New York Post published a photo of her brother, Jack Schlossberg, an eccentric left-wing influencer and candidate for New York Congress. He was pushing his son in a stroller. When her diagnosis was made public, the same media parroted the “Kennedy Curse” conspiracy.
In her much-discussed New Yorker essay “The War on My Blood,” Schlossberg wrote that doctors discovered her cancer after giving birth to her daughter in 2024. The cancer got worse. Her parents, brothers and sisters helped raise her husband, she said. They were sitting in the hospital room. They helped care for her son and daughter in ways she could not.
Schlossberg lost his mother, as well as his 46-year-old father, in a public assassination when he was 5 years old. Caroline Kennedy, 68, has now lost her 35-year-old daughter. “Throughout my life, I have tried to be a good student, a good sister, a good daughter, to protect my mother and never to upset or anger her,” Schlossberg wrote.
“Now I have added another tragedy to her life and the life of our family, and there is nothing I can do to stop it,” she added. Maria Shriver, her mother’s cousin, returned to social media to pay tribute to her friends and Hollywood heavyweights Rob Singer Reiner and Michelle Singer, two weeks after their deaths.
“She loved her life and fought tooth and nail to save it,” Shriver, the daughter of JFK’s sister, the late Eunice Kennedy Shriver, wrote of Schlossberg. “This doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make any sense at all.”
Schlossberg intended to write a book about the ocean. She loved her husband, mother and young children. She loved her life.
The ocean is vast, free and unknown. Schlossberg will no longer be able to study them. It’s hard to understand how oceans and climate change (another of her journalistic pursuits), devastating diagnoses, and family tragedies become tabloid fodder. It’s hard to tell the time.
“Living in the present is harder than it seems, so I let the memories come and go,” Schlossberg wrote in the closing essay for The New Yorker. “A lot of them are from my childhood, so I feel like I’m watching myself and my kids grow up at the same time.”
Our lives cannot be reduced to clickbait, headlines, and conspiracy theories.
Her life was a story.
Contributed by: Nicole Fallert, Sarah D. Wire
