President John F. Kennedy’s granddaughter has died at age 35.
Environmental journalist and author Tatiana Schlossberg died on Tuesday morning after being given a terminal cancer diagnosis.
“She will always be in our hearts,” her family said in a statement.
Schlossberg revealed just last month that she had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and was only given a year to live.
“I did not—could not—believe that they were talking about me,” she wrote in an essay for The New Yorker. “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.”
Schlossberg, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, is survived by her husband, George Moran, their one-year-old daughter, and their three-year-old son.
In her striking essay, Schlossberg marveled at her husband and mourned moments she wouldn’t get to spend with her children.
“George did everything for me that he possibly could,” she wrote. “My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me.”
Schlossberg said the news of her leukemia diagnosis was particularly difficult for her mother, who lost her father, JFK, in the 1963 assassination and her brother, John F. Kennedy Jr., in a 1999 plane crash.
“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 lamented.
The Schlossbergs have been outspoken critics of their own kin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was appointed health secretary by President Donald Trump. Caroline penned a letter to the Senate in an attempt to stop his confirmation, while Schlossberg and her brother Jack have repeatedly blasted him in public.
“I watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government,” Schlossberg wrote of her cousin.
Schlossberg’s work was published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Bloomberg View. She also authored the award-winning book Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have.
Her death marks the latest blow to the powerful political dynasty that has long been plagued by tragedy, which some have called the “Kennedy curse.”
In 2020, Maeve Kennedy McKean, the 40-year-old granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy, died in a canoe accident along with her 8-year-old son, Gideon. Saoirse Kennedy Hill, another RFK granddaughter, died in a drug overdose in 2019 at age 22. In 2018, JFK’s nephew Christopher Lawford, 63, died after a heart attack. Kara Kennedy, niece of JFK and RFK, also suffered a heart attack and died at 51 in 2011.
Two of RFK’s sons have also passed: David, 28, died from a drug overdose in 1984 and Michael, 39, died in a ski accident in 1997.
Witnesses told the New York Times that Michael was playing with a football when he lost control of one ski, causing him to crash into a tree and suffer a major head injury.
