Tatiana Schlossberg, an environmental journalist and the granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy, has died at 35, weeks after she publicly disclosed a terminal cancer diagnosis in a deeply personal essay that also criticized her cousin, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Schlossberg's death was announced on Tuesday in a family statement shared through the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation's social media. "Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts," the statement said.
In late November, Schlossberg published an essay titled "A Battle With My Blood" in The New Yorker describing her fight with acute myeloid leukemia, a form of blood cancer. "When you are dying, at least in my limited experience, you start remembering everything...Maybe my brain is replaying my life now because I have a terminal diagnosis, and all these memories will be lost," the essay began.
She wrote about the details of her diagnosis, but more crucially about Kennedy Jr.. Her piece detailed the alienation of RFK Jr. with the rest of his Democratic family, as well as criticizing his skepticism of vaccines and the cutting of funding for crucial cancer research.
"Meanwhile, during the CAR-T treatment, a method developed over many decades with millions of dollars of government funding, my cousin Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was in the process of being nominated and confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services... Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky.
Doctors and scientists at Columbia, including [her husband] George, didn't know if they would be able to continue their research or even have jobs... Bobby [Kennedy Jr.] is a known skeptic of vaccines, and I was especially concerned that I wouldn't be able to get mine again, leaving me to spend the rest of my life immunocompromised, along with millions of cancer survivors, small children, and the elderly."
Schlossberg was the middle child of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, and she built a public-facing career that, until her illness forced a shift in subject, largely focused on climate and the environment. She worked as a journalist at The New York Times and wrote the 2019 book "Inconspicuous Consumption," which examined the environmental impact of everyday choices.
She is survived by her husband, George Moran, her mother, Caroline Kennedy, her father, Edwin, and her siblings, Rose and Jack, who is currently running for Congress in New York City.
