I avoided reading Tatiana Schlossberg’s New Yorker article for as long as I could, just because I knew it would be a gut-punch. It was. Tatiana is the 35-year-old daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg. She is one of the three grandchildren of John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy. Tatiana has one brother (Jack) and one sister (Rose). She is married to a doctor, George Moran, and last year, she gave birth to their second child. Just days after she gave birth, she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. In the past year and a half, she’s tried a million different treatments, but she is now terminal. She wrote about all of this in an essay called “A Battle with My Blood.”
On May 25, 2024, my daughter was born at seven-oh-five in the morning, ten minutes after I arrived at Columbia-Presbyterian hospital, in New York. My husband, George, and I held her and stared at her and admired her newness. A few hours later, my doctor noticed that my blood count looked strange. A normal white-blood-cell count is around four to eleven thousand cells per microlitre. Mine was a hundred and thirty-one thousand cells per microlitre. It could just be something related to pregnancy and delivery, the doctor said, or it could be leukemia. “It’s not leukemia,” I told George. “What are they talking about?”
George, who was then a urology resident at the hospital, began calling friends who were primary-care doctors and ob-gyns. Everyone thought it was something to do with the pregnancy or the delivery. After a few hours, my doctors thought it was leukemia. My parents, Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, had brought my two-year-old son to the hospital to meet his sister, but suddenly I was being moved to another floor. My daughter was carried off to the nursery. My son didn’t want to leave; he wanted to drive my hospital bed like a bus. I said goodbye to him and my parents and was wheeled away.
The diagnosis was acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3. It was mostly seen in older patients. Every doctor I saw asked me if I had spent a lot of time at Ground Zero, given how common blood cancers are among first responders. I was in New York on 9/11, in the sixth grade, but I didn’t visit the site until years later. I am not elderly—I had just turned thirty-four.
…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 didn’t get mad when I was raging on steroids and yelled at him that I did not like Schweppes ginger ale, only Canada Dry. He would go home to put our kids to bed and come back to bring me dinner. I know that not everyone can be married to a doctor, but, if you can, it’s a very good idea. 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.
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. 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. This has been a great gift, even though I feel their pain 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. 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.
That’s when I started to lose it, and I’m crying even now – Tatiana thinking about what this is doing to her mother Caroline. Caroline, who lost her father at such a young age, and lost her brother nearly 30 years ago. Caroline having to step in and take care of her daughter’s babies because Tatiana has an aggressive form of leukemia. This poor family. The Kennedy curse is a real thing, I just hoped it would never hit Caroline’s children.
Tatiana devotes a good-sized chunk of her essay to her cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and how he’s destroying Health and Human Services, how he’s harming the American medical field and destroying government funding into life-saving technology, medicine and vaccines. She’s putting a human face on the cost of Trumpism and the very real things RFK Jr. has already done to harm and kill Americans.
Tatiana Schlossberg, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy, had just given birth when she was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. She writes about her fear of adding another tragedy to her family’s life. https://t.co/GR1vSZYmsW pic.twitter.com/NdTNuS0Acl
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) November 23, 2025
Screencaps courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Library video.
