NEW YORK — Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of former US President John F. Kennedy and daughter of former ambassador Caroline Kennedy, has revealed she is battling an aggressive form of cancer and has been given less than a year to live.
The 35-year-old climate journalist shared the news in a deeply personal essay, “A Battle With My Blood,” published in The New Yorker on Saturday — the 62nd anniversary of her grandfather’s assassination.
Schlossberg wrote that she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia shortly after giving birth to her second child in May 2024. Previously fit and active, she described a life of running, skiing and even once swimming in New York’s Hudson River to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, before suddenly finding herself on the other side of the cause.
Despite intensive treatment, including chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant, doctors have given her a grim prognosis.
“During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe,” she wrote. “My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me.”
Her son was born in 2022 and her daughter in 2024.
The essay also reflects on the weight of family history. Schlossberg recalls losing her uncle John F. Kennedy Jr in a plane crash at 38, and her grandmother Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to cancer when she was a toddler. Now, she says, she worries most about the pain her own illness will cause her mother.
“For my whole life, I have tried to be good… and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry,” Schlossberg wrote. “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 also describes watching, from her hospital bed, as her second cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr was confirmed as US health secretary under President Donald Trump — a move she strongly opposed.
“Suddenly, the healthcare system on which I relied felt strained, shaky,” she wrote, criticising his lack of experience in medicine, public health or government.
Earlier this month, Schlossberg’s brother, Jack, announced plans to run for Congress in New York. Sharing his sister’s essay online, he captioned it: “Life is short — let it rip.”
The Kennedy family’s long, intertwined history of public service and private tragedy gives Schlossberg’s account a familiar, painful resonance — and, in her own words, a stark reminder of “how little any of us can control.”
