President John F. Kennedy’s granddaughter has less than a year to live after doctors discovered leukemia hours after she gave birth.
Tatiana Schlossberg, 35, disclosed her terminal diagnosis in a Saturday essay in The New Yorker, writing that acute myeloid leukemia with a rare mutation has resisted multiple treatments since May 2024.
Doctors found the cancer on May 25 when blood tests showed her white cell count had spiked to 131,000 cells per microlitre, more than 10 times normal levels. The diagnosis came just hours after Schlossberg delivered her daughter at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York.
“My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me,” Schlossberg wrote about learning her prognosis. (RELATED: JFK Grandson Jack Schlossberg Decides Congress Needs Him, Mom Reportedly Not So Sure)
“When you are dying, at least in my limited experience, you start remembering everything.” Tatiana Schlossberg, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy, writes about receiving a terminal diagnosis. https://t.co/cqpafPbNOj
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) November 22, 2025
The environmental journalist and former New York Times reporter underwent chemotherapy, two bone marrow transplants and CAR-T cell therapy over the past year. Her sister donated stem cells for the first transplant. When the cancer returned, she received cells from an unrelated donor.
Schlossberg spent nearly six months hospitalized, suffering complications including a postpartum hemorrhage, graft-versus-host disease and kidney damage from an Epstein-Barr virus infection. She lost 30 pounds and had to relearn to walk.
The mother of two wrote she missed much of her infant daughter’s first year. Her 3-year-old son visited her daily during hospitalizations.
“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 wrote. “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.”
