Tatiana Schlossberg: A Life of Love, Legacy, and Facing Terminal Cancer

In November 2025, environmental journalist Tatiana Schlossberg revealed her devastating terminal cancer diagnosis to the world through a poignant essay in The New Yorker. The granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy Onassis disclosed that she was battling acute myeloid leukemia with a rare mutation called Inversion 3, which doctors told her could not be cured through standard treatment. What made this revelation all the more heartbreaking was its timing—Tatiana had learned of her diagnosis shortly after welcoming her daughter in May 2024, having given birth while appearing perfectly healthy. “I did not—could not—believe that they were talking about me,” she wrote. “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.” At the time of her diagnosis, Tatiana was given approximately one year to live, forcing her to confront not only her mortality but the devastating reality that she would leave behind her husband, George Moran, their young son Edwin, and their newborn daughter whose name the family has chosen to keep private.

Tatiana’s life before cancer was filled with accomplishment and love. After meeting her future husband George Moran while both were students at Yale University, their paths took them to impressive careers—George as a doctor at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, and Tatiana as an environmental reporter whose byline appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The Washington Post. They married in September 2017 at the Kennedy family home in Martha’s Vineyard in a ceremony officiated by former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick. Their family grew with the birth of their son Edwin in 2022, joyfully announced by Tatiana’s younger brother Jack Schlossberg during an appearance on NBC’s Today show. In May 2024, they welcomed their daughter, completing what Tatiana would later describe as “the wonderful life I had.” Throughout her cancer treatment, George provided unwavering support that Tatiana acknowledged in her New Yorker essay: “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 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.”

The most heart-wrenching aspect of Tatiana’s experience has been navigating motherhood while facing a terminal illness. Her son Edwin’s hospital visits became rare bright spots during her grueling treatment. “My son came to visit almost every day… The nurses brought me warm blankets and let me sit on the floor of the skyway with my son, even though I wasn’t supposed to leave my room,” she recalled. In a touching moment of connection as her hair began falling out from treatment, she wrote, “when my son came to visit, he wore [my head scarves], too.” Yet it was the relationship with her infant daughter that caused Tatiana perhaps the most anguish. Due to the risk of infection following bone marrow transplants, she was unable to provide hands-on care during much of her daughter’s first year. “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,” she wrote. “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.” This fear—that neither child would truly remember her—has been among the most painful aspects of her diagnosis.

The Kennedy-Schlossberg family has rallied around Tatiana with extraordinary solidarity. Her parents, Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, along with her siblings Rose and Jack, have played crucial roles in supporting her through treatment while helping to raise her children. “My parents and my brother and sister, too, have been raising my children and sitting in my various hospital rooms almost every day for the last year and a half,” she wrote. “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.” Caroline Kennedy, who followed in her family’s political footsteps as an ambassador to Australia and Japan during the Obama and Biden administrations, has once again faced tragedy in a family that has known more than its share. Tatiana acknowledged this painful reality: “For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her 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.”

While Tatiana’s immediate family has provided unwavering support, her experience has been complicated by broader family dynamics, particularly regarding her cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Following RFK Jr.’s endorsement of Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election and his subsequent appointment to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Tatiana found herself at odds with her cousin’s public stance on vaccines—a position that took on new significance given her immunocompromised state following cancer treatment. In her New Yorker essay, she expressed concern that her husband George’s job at Columbia University could be jeopardized by the Trump administration’s targeting of university campuses, potentially affecting their health insurance coverage at a critical time. More pointedly, she addressed RFK Jr.’s vaccine skepticism, writing: “Bobby is a known skeptic of vaccines, and I was especially concerned that I wouldn’t be able to get mine again, leaving me to spend the rest of my life immunocompromised, along with millions of cancer survivors, small children, and the elderly.” She directly challenged his statement that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective,” noting: “Bobby probably doesn’t remember the millions of people who were paralyzed or killed by polio before the vaccine was available. My dad, who grew up in New York City in the nineteen-forties and fifties, does remember.”

Tatiana Schlossberg’s story reflects not only a personal battle with terminal illness but also embodies the complex intertwining of the personal and political that has long characterized the Kennedy family legacy. As the granddaughter of JFK and Jackie Kennedy, she carries a name associated with both American royalty and profound tragedy. Now, facing her own mortality at a young age, she has chosen to share her experience with remarkable candor and grace. Her New Yorker essay reveals a woman determined to speak her truth while grappling with the most fundamental human fears: leaving behind young children, departing from a loving marriage too soon, and adding another chapter of grief to a family history already marked by loss. Yet through her environmental journalism and now through her unflinching account of living with terminal cancer, Tatiana has created her own meaningful legacy—one of intellectual curiosity, family devotion, and courage in the face of unimaginable circumstances. In doing so, she has offered readers a powerful meditation on what matters most when time becomes preciously finite: the love we give, the truth we speak, and the memories we hope to leave behind.