Tatiana Schlossberg, an environmental reporter and daughter of Caroline Kennedy, as well as the granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy, sadly passed away on Tuesday at the age of 35. Her poignant essay detailing her battle with a rare and aggressive form of blood cancer, which was shared in The New Yorker magazine last November, garnered international sympathy and admiration for her bravery and candidness.
The announcement of her passing was made through an Instagram update by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, with a note from her family, but it did not disclose the location of her death.
The essay, named “A Battle With My Blood,” was released online on November 22, coinciding with the 62nd anniversary of her grandfather’s assassination. (The print version had a different title, “A Further Shore,” in the December 8 edition of the magazine.) In this piece, Ms. Schlossberg recounted the moment she discovered her cancer after giving birth to her daughter in May 2024 when her doctor noted an abnormality in her blood count and suggested it could either be related to her pregnancy or leukemia.
It turned out to be leukemia with an unusual mutation. At that time, Ms. Schlossberg was a new mother to a baby girl and had a 2-year-old son.
“I could not — I simply could not — accept that they were discussing my situation,” she expressed. “The day before, I had completed a mile swim in the pool while nine months pregnant. I felt healthy; I didn’t have any illnesses. I actually considered myself one of the healthiest individuals I knew. I regularly jogged distances of five to ten miles in Central Park. I once swam three miles across the Hudson River — strangely, to raise funds for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.”
She continued, “This was unimaginable in my life.”
She detailed her journey through months of chemotherapy and a postpartum hemorrhage that nearly resulted in her death, followed by more chemotherapy and then a stem cell transplant — a last-resort effort that could possibly save her life. Her elder sister, Rose Schlossberg, proved to be a suitable match and agreed to contribute her cells for the transplant. Her brother, Jack Schlossberg, who is currently campaigning for Congress in New York’s 12th district, was identified as a half-match; however, he urged the medical team to explore the possibility of him being able to donate as well. (He was not able to donate.)
Following the transplant, when Ms. Schlossberg’s hair began to fall out, Jack chose to shave his head in support of her. To keep her bald head covered, she opted to wear scarves; during her hospital visits, her son would also wear a scarf in solidarity.
Because of the risk of infection, she was never able to give her baby the complete care she needed, including feeding, bathing, and diapering her, and her treatments kept her away from home for almost half of her first year of life.
Ms. Schlossberg stated, “I do not know who, actually, she thinks I am and whether she would feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother.”
She underwent further chemotherapy, went into remission, relapsed, and enrolled in a clinical trial. Blood transfusions, an additional stem cell transplant from an unrelated donor, additional chemotherapy, and more setbacks were all experienced. She entered another clinical trial, relapsed, went into remission once more, and got an Epstein-Barr virus strain. Her own cells were attacked by the transplanted ones, a condition known as graft-versus-host disease. She was too feeble to pick up her kids when she returned home from a hospital stay in October.
Her oncologist informed her that he believed he could be able to prolong her life for an additional year.
She added, “I have tried to be good my entire life, to be a good student, a good sister, and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or furious.” There is nothing I can do to stop the new tragedy I have brought into her and our family’s lives.
Naturally, the Kennedy family has been plagued by tragedy for many years. Former ambassador to Australia and Japan Caroline Kennedy was only five years old when her father was killed on November 22, 1963; she was ten years old when her uncle Robert F. Kennedy, a contender for president in the 1968 Democratic primary, was killed. In 1999, her brother John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her sister Lauren Bessette perished when the jet he was flying crashed off Martha’s Vineyard. Tatiana had been a flower girl at his wedding three years prior, and he was 38 years old.
Ms. Kennedy was mostly successful in providing her own children with a life out of the spotlight, a comparatively regular, albeit wealthy, upbringing, along with a call to public service that was the Kennedy heritage, despite having grown up in the glare of her parents’ splendor and her family’s tragedy.
The middle child of Ms. Kennedy and interactive digital designer Edwin Schlossberg, Tatiana Celia Kennedy Schlossberg was born in Manhattan on May 5, 1990. She went to private schools in Manhattan, first Brearley School and later Trinity School. She received a master’s degree in history from Oxford University in 2014 after completing her studies in history at Yale University in 2012.
In the interim, Ms. Schlossberg, previously the editor of The Yale Herald, was employed at The Record in northern New Jersey, where she reported on diverse topics, including the competition among doughnut shops, the theft of puppies, incidents of gun-related violence, and the impacts of Hurricane Sandy. In 2012, she received the title of Rookie of the Year from the New Jersey Society of Professional Journalists. She became part of The New York Times team in 2014, initially on the metropolitan desk and later specializing as a reporter focused on science and climate issues.
In a personal essay she wrote for The Times in 2015, she referred to herself as somewhat nerdy. That year, while covering an increase in overdoses at Wesleyan University, her supervisors sent her back to the Middletown, Connecticut, campus to delve into the local drug culture. At the age of 24, they believed she could easily fit in.
“During my college years, I had never truly desired to attend parties,” she recalled, “and now I was expected to spend a Friday night figuring out where parties happened at a university I didn’t attend and with no acquaintances? It felt like a nightmare.”
She added, “Additionally, no one had ever truly offered me drugs while I was in school, so I was clueless about how to locate them. I informed my younger, far more popular brother that I needed to report on drugs at Wesleyan. His response was: ‘Why are they sending you? You’re basically a narc.’”
While on the metro desk, Ms. Schlossberg reported on grisly homicides as well as lighter stories, such as a nun being considered for sainthood, the icebreaker ships in New York Harbor, the gradual decline of bodegas, and the strange finding of a deceased black bear cub in Central Park in 2014. A decade later, The New Yorker revealed that the remains had been placed there by her cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as an unusual prank.
“Similar to law enforcement,” she remarked in her discussion with The Times, “I was unaware of who was behind this incident when I composed the article.”
In her New Yorker essay, she criticized her cousin for his role as secretary of Health and Human Services, labeling him as “an embarrassment to me and my close family.”
As she pointed out, during his time in office, financial support for medical research was being reduced at institutions like Columbia University, where her husband, George Moran, a urologist, serves as an assistant professor, and she feared for both his job and those of his coworkers. She expressed her distress over Mr. Kennedy’s decision to cut half a billion dollars for mRNA vaccine research, a technology also used against certain types of cancer. Following her severe postpartum hemorrhage, she was administered mifepristone, a medication utilized for medical terminations; she highlighted that her cousin had instructed the Food and Drug Administration to reassess the drug after decades of established safety.
“All at once,” she stated, “the healthcare system I depended on felt vulnerable and unstable.”
“Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Did not Know You Had” (2019), written by Ms. Schlossberg, is a consumer’s guide to the ways that human behavior negatively impacts the environment. The book received the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists in 2020. Instead of being overcome by climate dread and fatalism, Ms. Schlossberg hoped her book would assist individuals in changing their purchasing and behavioral patterns.
“Change is possible, so we do not have to keep living like this, in fear of the future and guilt about the past,” she wrote.
Along with her two small children, Ms. Schlossberg’s parents, brothers, and husband—whom she met at Yale and married in 2017—all survive her.
She had been getting ready to start reporting for her second book, which was about the world’s seas and climate change, before to her sickness. She discovered that cytarabine, one of her chemotherapy medications, came from a kind of sea sponge that was initially created in 1959 by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. She wrote that those scientists “probably definitely relied on government funding,” which her cousin had eliminated.
In the introduction to a 2022 version of “Inconspicuous Consumption,” Ms. Schlossberg stated that “climate change is at its core a justice concern.” It makes inequality both inside and between nations worse. Yes, we must protect polar bears, but we also need to protect people. In actuality, if we do not preserve people, we will not be able to save polar bears.
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