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Tragedy has once again befallen the Kennedy family as Tatiana Schlossberg, the 35-year-old granddaughter of the late President John F. Kennedy, has revealed her heartbreaking diagnosis. On Saturday, she announced that she has less than a year to live due to a severe form of blood cancer.
In a poignant essay titled “A Battle With My Blood,” published in the New Yorker on the anniversary of her grandfather’s assassination on November 22, Schlossberg disclosed her struggle with myeloid leukemia, which includes a rare mutation. This date marks 62 years since President Kennedy was tragically killed in Dallas, adding a somber layer to her revelation.
As a mother of two, Schlossberg’s narrative is deeply personal and impactful. She writes, “Maybe my brain is replaying my life now because I have a terminal diagnosis, and all these memories will be lost. Maybe it’s because I don’t have much time to make new ones, and some part of me is sifting through the sands.” Her words capture the profound emotional journey she is navigating.
The discovery of her condition came unexpectedly. Doctors at Columbia-Presbyterian hospital in New York identified an unusually high white blood cell count just hours after she delivered her second child in May 2024. Initial thoughts ranged from a delivery-related issue to the alarming possibility of leukemia.
In a moment of disbelief, Schlossberg recounted her conversation with her husband, George Moran, who was completing his urology residency at the same hospital. “It’s not leukemia,” she assured him, puzzled by the doctors’ concerns. “What are they talking about?” she questioned, echoing the shock that such a diagnosis would inspire.
Schlossberg reports that physicians discovered a high white cell count in her bloodwork just hours after she gave birth to her second child in May 2024 at Columbia-Presbyterian hospital in New York. Doctors thought it could be something related to the delivery or “it could be leukemia,” she wrote.
“It’s not leukemia,” she told her husband George Moran, who was then a urology resident at the hospital. “What are they talking about?”
But it was.
Since then, she and oncologists have been fighting the disease with chemotherapy, blood transfusions and a bone-marrow transplant. The mutation that afflicts Schlossberg is called “Inversion 3,” and is typically only seen in older patients.
In January, she joined a clinical trial of a new cell therapy. But she writes she has been told she has less than 12 months to live.
Schlossberg, the daughter of President Kennedy’s daughter Carolyn, is a Yale graduate with a master’s degree from Oxford. She previously worked as a journalist at The New York Times and published her first book in 2019 about everyday impact humans have on the environment.
The Kennedy family – the descendants of New Deal-era ambassador and businessman Joseph P. Kennedy – is often reported to have an inordinate share of unforeseen deaths and tragedy, with sensational media even applying the phrase “the Kennedy curse” over the years.
Family tragedies well preceded the president’s 1963 assassination. Joseph Kennedy’s eldest son Joe died in a 1944 World War II plane crash. Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, JFK’s sister, died in a plane crash in bad weather in France in 1948.
The untimely deaths continued. Schlossberg’s great uncle, former Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was felled by an assassin’s bullet while campaigning for the presidency in Los Angeles in 1968.
Her uncle – her mother’s brother, John F. Kennedy, Jr., went down in a small plane crash into the waters of the Atlantic in an ill-advised flight he tried to pilot to Martha’s Vineyard one foggy night in 1999. His wife and sister-in-law also perished in that accident.
Other deaths in the Kennedy clan over the decades include a suicide, two drug overdoses, a skiing accident, and two who drowned.
Schlossberg is the second of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg’s three children. Her brother Jack, 32, is running for Congress in the 12th Congressional District being vacated by Manhattan Rep. Jerold Nadler (D-NY).
Schlossberg has been married to urologist George Moran, whom she met as an undergrad at Yale, since 2017. The couple has two children: son Edwin, 3, and a daughter, now aged 18 months.
She writes in her New Yorker piece of the eventual loss her children may experience.
“My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me,” she wrote.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
