Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of John F. Kennedy, has died at age 35

Tatiana Schlossberg, an environmental journalist, author and granddaughter of former President John F. Kennedy, died Tuesday after a battle with an aggressive form of blood cancer. She was 35. 

The John F. Kennedy Library Foundation announced her death in a post on Instagram, accompanied by a photo of Schlossberg smiling while on a reporting trip off the coast of Santa Barbara in 2022. 

“Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning,” the post said. “She will always be in our hearts.”

The post was signed by her parents, Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg; her husband, George Moran; her two young children, Edwin and Josephine Moran; her brother, Jack Schlossberg; sister Rose Schlossberg; and sister-in-law Rory. 

Schlossberg announced she had received a terminal acute myeloid leukemia diagnosis immediately after the birth of her daughter in a New Yorker essay titled “A Battle With My Blood” on Nov. 22. The essay later appeared in the Dec. 8 print edition of the magazine under a different title, “A Further Shore.”

In the essay, Schlossberg provides a deeply personal account of her harrowing battle with terminal blood cancer. Just after turning 34, Schlossberg gave birth to her daughter, Josephine, in New York. She already had a 2-year-old son, Edwin, who was on his way to the hospital to meet his new baby sister when Schlossberg’s doctor noticed her white-blood-cell count looked strange. 

“I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me,” Schlossberg wrote in the essay. “I had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I needed to take care of. This could not possibly be my life.”

Her moving account of confronting the reality of death as a new mother came while her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., slashed funding for the National Institutes of Health, upending potentially life-saving clinical cancer trials.

“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 half a billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines,” Schlossberg wrote.

Schlossberg had a distinguished  career as an environmental journalist. She covered science and climate for The New York Times and freelanced for The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The Boston Globe, Bloomberg and Yale Environment 360.

Before graduating from Yale University in 2012 with a bachelor’s degree in history, Schlossberg was the editor-in-chief of The Yale Herald. She later attended the University of Oxford where she earned a master’s degree in history. 

In 2019, she published a book titled “Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have.” The book, which describes the unseen environmental and climate impacts of modern lifestyle and capitalism, won the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award in 2020. 

Tatiana was the daughter of American diplomat Caroline Kennedy and designer Edwin Schlossberg. Her mother is the eldest and only living child of John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Her brother, Jack Schlossberg, is running in the Democratic primary to succeed retiring Rep. Jerrold Nadler in New York’s 12th Congressional District, which encompasses much of Manhattan. 

Both Tatiana and Jack Schlossberg, along with their mother, were outspoken against RFK Jr.’s failed presidential bid in 2024 and confirmation as President Donald Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services early this year. 

Caroline wrote a damning letter to the Senate in January, urging the chamber to reject her cousin’s nomination as the nation’s top health official. 

Prior to receiving her diagnosis, Schlossberg struck out on her own as a journalist, starting a weekly newsletter titled “News From a Changing Planet.” In the last edition, published two days before Christmas in 2023, Schlossberg detailed Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’, which she described as a powerful wake-up call about climate change. 

She described using a vile of holy water blessed by Pope Francis himself and a rosary to pray during an intense round of cancer treatment. 

“Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I’ll remember this forever, I’ll remember this when I’m dead,” Schlossberg wrote of watching her two young children grow up. “Obviously, I won’t. But since I don’t know what death is like and there’s no one to tell me what comes after it, I’ll keep pretending.”