Tatiana Schlossberg, JFK’s granddaughter, dies at 35 from rare form of leukemia

Schlossberg, an environmental journalist and author, revealed in November that she had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia after the birth of her second child in 2024

AP — Environmental journalist Tatiana Schlossberg, one of three grandchildren of the late US president John F. Kennedy, has died. She was 35.

Schlossberg, the daughter of Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy, and Jewish American designer Edwin Schlossberg, revealed she had terminal cancer in a November 2025 essay in The New Yorker. A family statement disclosing her death was posted on social media Tuesday by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.

“Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts,” the statement said. It did not disclose a location or cause of death, although Schlossberg was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in May 2024 at age 34.

After the birth of her second child, Schlossberg’s doctor noticed her white blood cell count was high. It turned out to be acute myeloid leukemia with a rare mutation, mostly seen in older people and among first responders to the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York.

In the essay, “A Battle With My Blood,” Schlossberg recounted going through rounds of chemotherapy and two stem cell transplants and participating in clinical trials. During the most recent trial, she wrote, her doctor told her “he could keep me alive for a year, maybe.”

Her first thought upon hearing that, she wrote, was that “my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me.”

Schlossberg also criticized policies pushed by her mother’s cousin, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in the essay, saying policies he backed could hurt cancer patients like her. Her mother had urged senators to reject his confirmation.

“As I spent more and more of my life under the care of doctors, nurses, and researchers striving to improve the lives of others, I watched as Bobby cut nearly a half billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers,” the essay reads.

Schlossberg had worked as a reporter covering climate change and the environment for The New York Times’ Science section. Her 2019 book “Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have” won the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Rachel Carson Environment Book Award in 2020.

Schlossberg and her two siblings, Rose and Jack, were raised Catholic, but several of their father’s Jewish traditions were incorporated into their home life as well.

In a 2007 interview with a local news outlet, Caroline said the family would “incorporate Hanukkah” into their holiday season, and would “light the menorah and play dreidel and sing songs at our holiday party.”

Schlossberg wrote in The New Yorker essay that she feared her daughter and son wouldn’t remember her. She felt cheated and sad that she wouldn’t get to keep living “the wonderful life” she had with her husband, George Moran.

While her parents and siblings tried to hide their pain from her, she said she felt it every day.

“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,” she said. “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.”

Schlossberg’s mother, Caroline, was 5 years old when her father, then-president John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas in 1963. She was 10 when her uncle, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Los Angeles in 1968 while he was running for president.

Caroline’s brother, John F. Kennedy Jr., died in 1999 when the single-engine plane he was piloting plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. His wife, Carolyn, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, also died in the crash.

Tatiana is survived by her parents, siblings, her husband, and their two children.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.