Tatiana Schlossberg is seriously ill
Grandson Kennedy: The doctors only gave me a year
November 23, 2025 – 12:18Reading time: 2 minutes
Tatiana Schlossberg is seriously ill. JFK’s granddaughters have written about his departure from life.
John F. Kennedy’s granddaughter and Caroline Kennedy’s daughter, Tatiana Schlossberg, has been diagnosed with fatal leukemia. In an article in the New Yorker magazine, he reported on his illness and how he planned to spend the last few remaining weeks.
The 35-year-old writer was diagnosed with blood cancer in May last year, while she was giving birth to her second child. The doctors found abnormalities in his blood tests. Examination results: myeloid leukemia with a rare mutation called inversion 3. According to the American Cancer Society (ACS), acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a cancer that appears in the bone marrow and spreads quickly to the blood. Common symptoms include weight loss, fatigue, fever, night sweats, and loss of appetite.
At first he didn’t want to admit it, he wrote in an essay entitled “A Fight with My Blood.” “That’s not my life.” He had been swimming in the pool the day before. “I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. In fact, I was one of the healthiest people I knew. I regularly ran five to ten miles in Central Park,” Kennedy’s grandson recalled.
He was hospitalized for five weeks, then started chemotherapy and underwent a bone marrow transplant. In January he took part in testing of a special therapy. But the cancer returned.
“During the last clinical trial, my doctor told me he could probably keep me alive for another year,” he wrote. “My first thought was that my children, whose faces live forever behind my eyelids, would no longer remember me.”
His mother, Caroline Kennedy, was the only surviving child of a US president. His cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the US Secretary of Health and Human Services. However, science writers considered him unsuitable for the position. His older brother, Jack Schlossberg, wanted to maintain the Kennedy tradition and ran for the US House of Representatives.
Now Tatiana Schlossberg has realized her fate. “When you die, at least in my limited experience, you start to remember everything. Images come in flashes — people, places, and random conversations — and they don’t stop. I watched my best friend from elementary school make mud pies in her yard, decorate them with candles and small American flags, and then watch in panic as the flags burned,” she said, describing her thoughts.
He is now spending his final days and months at home. “Most of the time I try to live in the here and now and be with them. But being in the here and now is harder than it sounds, so I let the memories come and go,” he said. “Sometimes I tell myself that I will remember it forever, that I will remember it even when I die. Of course I won’t.”
