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Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of JFK, dead at 35
Tatiana Schlossberg, an environmental journalist and the granddaughter of former President John F. Kennedy, died Tuesday, aged 35.
The JFK Library Foundation announced Schlossberg’s death in an online statement Tuesday afternoon, just weeks after she shared the news of her terminal cancer diagnosis.
“Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts,” the statement reads.
The post was signed “George, Edwin and Josephine Moran, Ed, Caroline, Jack, Rose and Rory.”
Schlossberg is survived by her husband, George Moran, and their two children. She’s also survived by her parents, Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, and her siblings, Jack Schlossberg and Rose Schlossberg.
Schlossberg revealed she was diagnosed with a rare type of acute myeloid leukemia, a blood cancer, in a New Yorker essay published last month. In the essay, the 35-year-old recounted how she couldn’t believe she had received the terminal diagnosis.
“I did not—could not—believe that they were talking about me. I had swum a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick,” she wrote.
Schlossberg said that she was diagnosed shortly after giving birth to her daughter last year, when doctors noticed her white blood cell count was elevated. Her son was two years old at the time.
“During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe. My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me,” she wrote.
In her essay, Schlossberg also criticized her cousin, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She decried his cuts to research funding, particularly for “mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers.”
Maria Shriver, a journalist and the former first lady of California, praised her cousin’s New Yorker essay last month.
“If you can only read one thing today, please make/take the time for this extraordinary piece of writing by my cousin Caroline’s extraordinary daughter Tatiana,” Shriver wrote. “Tatiana is a beautiful writer, journalist, wife, mother, daughter, sister, and friend.”
Schlossberg worked as an environmental journalist, focusing on the impacts of climate change. She published several stories in The Washington Post, including an investigation into the impacts of climate change on cranberry farmers.
In 2019, Schlossberg also published Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have.
The work earned her the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award, with the judges writing that her readers “will find solace, humor and a route to feeling empowered with possibilities for positive change, rather than drained by an accumulation of bad news.”
This is a breaking news story. Check back for updates.
