Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy, has revealed she is battling terminal cancer, disclosing her diagnosis in an essay published by The New Yorker on Saturday.
The 35-year-old said she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), an aggressive cancer of the blood and bone marrow, on May 25, 2024, the same day she gave birth to her second child. Doctors identified the illness after detecting an abnormally high white blood cell count shortly after delivery.
“I considered myself one of the healthiest people I knew,” she wrote, describing her shock. “This could not possibly be my life.”
According to the American Cancer Society, the rare mutation involved in her case, known as Inversion 3, is considered an unfavorable abnormality that typically signals a difficult prognosis.
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Schlossberg spent weeks in Columbia Presbyterian and Memorial Sloan Kettering receiving chemotherapy and a bone-marrow transplant before joining a CAR T-cell therapy clinical trial. She said the cancer “continued to return” despite multiple rounds of treatment.
During her latest trial, a doctor told her he could keep her alive for “a year, maybe,” a prediction she said left her worried that “my kids… wouldn’t remember me.”
She thanked her family for their constant support, noting that her parents and siblings “have been raising my children and sitting in my various hospital rooms almost every day for the last year and a half.”
Her essay, published on the anniversary of her grandfather’s assassination, places her health battle within a family history long marked by tragedy.