Bad luck strikes the Kennedy clan again. On the 62nd anniversary of the assassination of President John F Kennedy, his granddaughter Tatiana Schlossberg, 35, daughter of Caroline Kennedy, has revealed she has terminal cancer and doctors give her less than a year to live.
Schlossberg, a journalist specializing in environmental issues and mother of two children, announced that she suffers from a particularly aggressive leukemia in an article published this Saturday in the New Yorker magazine, in which she also launched a harsh criticism against the health policies implemented by her cousin, the US Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy.
According to the article A battle with my bloodDoctors discovered her illness when she gave birth to her daughter in May last year and saw, in a blood test, that her white blood cell count was abnormally high. Schlossberg carefully describes the treatments, conventional and experimental, she has since undergone to try to cure her: two spinal cord stem cell transplants, long sessions of chemotherapy and immunotherapy, among them. With humor, she also talks about her side effects and the help she received from doctors (her husband is one of them), nurses and family members. Among these, his brother Jack, who recently announced his candidacy for a seat in the US Congress.
That help “has been a great gift, even though I feel her pain every day. All my life I have tried to be good, a good student, a good sister and a good daughter, and I have tried to protect my mother, and never make her sad or angry. Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to the life of our family, and there is nothing I can do to stop it,” writes the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and designer Edwin Schlossberg.
Caroline Kennedy, 67, former US ambassador to Australia and Japan, was five when her father was assassinated in Dallas. His uncle, Robert F Kennedy, was also assassinated five years later. His brother, John F Kennedy junior, known during his childhood as John Johndied along with his wife Caroline Bessette, when the small plane he was piloting en route to the island of Martha’s Vineyard crashed into the waters off the coast of Massachusetts.
Humor and melancholy give way to anger in the second part of the article, in which he draws a parallel between the stages of his treatment and his cousin’s political career over the last year and a half: from an independent, no-chance presidential candidate, viewed with skepticism by his own family and the Democratic Party for his anti-vaccine positions, he moved on to supporting Donald Trump and taking part in his campaign; from there, to be proposed and confirmed by the Senate as Health Secretary last January.
“Suddenly, the health care system she depended on felt strained and fragile. The doctors and scientists at Columbia (the university to which the hospital that treated her is connected) didn’t know if they would be able to continue their research, or even keep their jobs,” she recalls. Columbia was an early target of the Trump administration in its crusade against alleged anti-Semitism on college campuses; In May the institute fired 180 researchers following cuts imposed by the Republican Party.
Schlossberg adds further detail: “As I spent more and more time under the care of doctors, nurses, and researchers fighting to improve the lives of others, I watched Bobby cut nearly half a billion dollars in messenger RNA vaccines, a technology that can be used against some cancers; eliminate billions of dollars in funding for the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest funder of medical research; and threaten to fire the medical panel responsible for recommending preventive cancer screening tests.” Hundreds of clinical trials and grants of research have been cancelled, which has affected thousands of patients.”
His article ends with a declaration of love for his children, and with the disbelief aroused by the thought of not seeing them grow up. “Sometimes I delude myself into thinking that I will remember all of this (the experiences with his children) forever, that I will remember it when I die. Of course, that won’t be the case. But because I don’t know what death is and there’s no one to tell me what will happen next, I will continue to delude myself. I will continue to try to remember.”
