Tatiana Schlossberg, a journalist and the granddaughter of John F Kennedy, disclosed on Saturday that she had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, saying her doctor informed her that she has less than a year left to live.
The environmental writer also addressed her cousin, Robert F Kennedy Jr, criticizing the influence his policies as secretary of health and human services have had on her experience with the illness.
In an essay for the New Yorker published on Saturday, the 35-year-old daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg revealed that she had acute myeloid leukemia.
Schlossberg learned of her diagnosis shortly after giving birth to her second child with husband George Moran in May 2024 and has been undergoing treatment since then.
“I did not – could not – believe that they were talking about me,” Schlossberg wrote. “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.”
Later in the essay, as she described her ongoing treatments, Schlossberg criticized Kennedy’s policies as health secretary. She expressed strong disapproval of his anti-vaccine positions and his decisions to cut funding for medical research, emphasizing the harm such actions cause to patients like herself.
“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,” she wrote.
She continued that Kennedy “slashed billions in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest sponsor of medical research; and threatened to oust the panel of medical experts charged with recommending preventive cancer screenings”.
Schlossberg added that doctors at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving medical center, where she was receiving care, were uncertain about their future after the Trump administration withdrew federal funding from the university.
“Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky,” Schlossberg wrote. The university later reached an agreement with the Trump administration that reinstated the funding.
Schlossberg was previously a climate reporter for the New York Times, and has written for the Atlantic, the Washington Post and Vanity Fair. She and Moran share a three-year-old son and a one-year-old daughter.
She concluded her essay reflecting on her focus in the time she has left, writing that she hopes to “fill my brain with memories” of her children: “I try to live and be with them now. But being in the present is harder than it sounds, so I let the memories come and go … I will keep trying to remember.”
