Tatiana Schlossberg Reveals Terminal Leukemia Diagnosis After the Birth of Her Second Child

Tatiana Schlossberg, 35, the granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy, has revealed in a personal essay that she has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of acute myeloid leukemia carrying a rare Inversion 3 mutation and was told she may have less than a year to live.

Schlossberg writes that the abnormality was first noticed about 10 minutes after she delivered her second child in May 2024, when doctors flagged a white blood cell count that "looked strange." She described her stunned reaction: "I did not—could not—believe that they were talking about me." The day before the birth she had swum a mile while nine months pregnant; she said she had felt healthy until that moment.

Treatment and prognosis

She details intensive treatment including multiple rounds of chemotherapy, participation in clinical trials and two bone marrow transplants at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City. Despite those efforts, the leukemia returned. In her essay she recounts a doctor telling her he could keep her "alive for a year, maybe."

"I had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I need to take care of," she wrote.

Family context and reaction

Schlossberg is the second child of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg. She reflected on the weight of being part of the Kennedy family and the guilt of adding another crisis to its history of loss. Her essay was published on the anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, which she noted added to the emotional resonance of the moment.

She referenced other family tragedies — the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's death in 1994 from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and the 1999 plane crash that killed John F. Kennedy Jr. — and described how painful it was to confront another family emergency.

Relatives and friends reacted with support. Her cousin Maria Shriver urged readers to read Schlossberg's piece and praised her as "a beautiful writer, journalist, wife, mother, daughter, sister, and friend."

Policy concerns she raised

Schlossberg used her platform to raise concerns about recent health-policy shifts. She criticized the nomination and confirmation of her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services, writing that his decisions led to substantial cuts in research funding. In the essay she wrote that nearly half a billion dollars was cut from mRNA vaccine research and that many National Institutes of Health grants and clinical trials were canceled — changes she fears could harm future care.

She described a frightening postpartum episode in which she was given misoprostol to stop hemorrhaging. Because that drug is also used in medication abortion, she worries that political debates and regulatory review could limit access to essential care.

Memory, family and legacy

Throughout the essay Schlossberg focuses on family: the husband she calls her "kind, funny, handsome genius," the two young children she is raising with her husband, Dr. George Moran (they married in 2017), and how to leave memories for her children. She describes trying to be present with her family while also collecting moments to carry them through if she dies: "Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I'll remember this forever, I'll remember this when I'm dead."

Her account reads as both a medical chronicle and a reflection on mortality, memory and the responsibilities of belonging to a prominent family during a deeply personal crisis.