A Battle With My Blood: Tatiana Schlossberg and the Kennedy Family’s New Tragedy

Prologue: A Single Test, A Shattered World

On a spring morning in 2024, Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy, walked into a New York hospital to give birth to her daughter. She left carrying a diagnosis that would change everything: acute myeloid leukemia, driven by a rare and aggressive genetic mutation. For America’s most storied political family, it was another chapter of heartbreak—one that would test their strength, their love, and their understanding of fate.

Chapter 1: The Diagnosis

Tatiana had always been strong. Five- and ten-mile runs through Central Park were routine; she’d once swum the Hudson River to raise money for blood cancer research. Even at nine months pregnant, she swam a mile the day before giving birth. No one could have guessed that something was wrong.

But hours after delivering baby Josephine on May 25, 2024, Tatiana’s blood panel revealed a terrifying number: 131,000 blast cells per microliter, when normal readings fall between 4,000 and 11,000. The diagnosis was acute myeloid leukemia, carrying a mutation called inversion 3—a genetic twist found in less than 2% of cases, infamous for its resistance to treatment.

In inversion 3, a chromosome breaks apart, flips backward, and reinserts itself. This triggers uncontrolled growth of cancer cells through the misexpression of genes called EVI1 and GATA2. Oncologists at top cancer centers described her mutation as one of the most aggressive they’d ever seen.

Chapter 2: The Weight of History

Tatiana’s mother, Caroline Kennedy, understood tragedy better than most. She was five when her father, President Kennedy, was assassinated, and ten when her uncle Robert Kennedy died. In 1999, Caroline’s brother John Jr. crashed his plane into the Atlantic, taking his wife Carolyn and her sister Lauren with him. Tatiana had been a flower girl at that wedding just three years earlier.

Now, the family faced another nightmare. Columbia Presbyterian became Tatiana’s home for five weeks after Josephine’s birth. She nearly bled to death from a postpartum hemorrhage, requiring emergency intervention. Chemotherapy began, but the real hope was a bone marrow transplant—a race to find a donor match.

Chapter 3: Sisters and Sacrifice

Rose Kennedy Schlossberg, two years older than Tatiana, was that match. After attending Brearley School together, Rose went to Harvard and built a career as a television producer and filmmaker, marrying restaurateur Rory McAuliffe in 2022. When tests confirmed she could donate, there was no hesitation. Siblings have only a 25% chance of being a perfect match, but Rose was in that fortunate minority.

Their brother Jack, the youngest Kennedy grandchild, was only a half match. He kept asking doctors if that might somehow work better, searching for hope in the numbers.

The donation procedure was grueling. Rose lay for hours, arms outstretched as her blood was drained, stem cells extracted, then blood pumped back. Tatiana watched her sister give everything she could. When the transfusion came, Tatiana felt sensations nobody had warned her about: the stem cells smelled like canned tomato soup, and she sneezed twelve times before vomiting.

Recovery was a waiting game, hoping Rose’s cells would take hold and transform Tatiana’s failing system. Small moments of humor crept in—would Tatiana develop Rose’s banana allergy, or absorb some of her personality traits along with the healthy cells?

Chapter 4: Family, Love, and Loss

Hair loss came next. Tatiana wrapped scarves around her head, remembering how good her hair used to look. Jack shaved his own head in solidarity. Tatiana’s young son Edwin wore scarves too, wanting to match his mother.

Remission arrived after the transplant, bringing relief. But cancer doesn’t negotiate. The leukemia returned. This time, Tatiana needed cells from an anonymous donor—a man in his twenties from the Pacific Northwest.

Another round of chemotherapy followed, and more than fifty days at Memorial Sloan Kettering. In January 2025, Tatiana enrolled in a clinical trial for CAR T-cell therapy, an experimental approach that represented one of her last options.

Chapter 5: Marriage and the Meaning of Care

Through it all, Tatiana’s husband George Moran stayed by her side. They met as undergraduates at Yale, married in September 2017 at the Kennedy estate on Martha’s Vineyard, former Governor Deval Patrick officiating. George became a urologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and his medical training meant he understood exactly what his wife was facing.

Tatiana wrote about George with obvious love and admiration. He handled conversations with doctors and insurance companies she couldn’t bear. Hospital floors became his bed. He drove home each night to get their children to sleep, then returned with dinner. One memory she shared involved raging at him while on steroids because he brought Schweppes ginger ale instead of Canada Dry—and he never got angry. She called him perfect, kind, funny, and a genius. The unfairness of losing their future together broke her heart more than the disease itself.

Chapter 6: The Fight for Tomorrow

Remission came again after the second transplant. Relapse followed. Another clinical trial started. Epstein-Barr virus attacked Tatiana’s weakened system. Graft-versus-host disease developed as the donated cells began turning against her own body.

In October 2025, Tatiana returned home from another hospital stay. But she lacked the strength to lift her own children. Edwin, three, might hold on to scattered memories of her as he grew older, though those would likely blur with photographs and stories told by others. Josephine was barely a year old and would remember nothing.

Tatiana confronted this reality directly in her writing, admitting she never really got to take care of her daughter because infection risks after the transplants prevented her from changing diapers or giving baths. Nearly half of Josephine’s first year passed with her mother absent, and Tatiana questioned whether her daughter would feel any connection to her after she died.

Chapter 7: The Final Truth

Her latest clinical trial ended with her doctor delivering the final prognosis: he could keep her alive for a year, maybe. The New Yorker published Tatiana’s essay on November 22, 2025—a date that marked 62 years since President Kennedy’s assassination. She titled it “A Battle With My Blood,” holding nothing back.

Tatiana wrote about her parents and siblings, acknowledging that they had spent a year and a half raising her children and sitting in hospital rooms almost every day. They held her hand through suffering while hiding their own pain to protect her. She called this a great gift, even though she felt their grief constantly.

What tormented her most was the burden she placed on her mother. Tatiana wrote that she had spent her whole life trying to be good, to protect Caroline and never cause her upset or anger. Now, she had added another tragedy to her mother’s life, and stopping it was beyond her control.

Chapter 8: Legacy and Memory

Presidential historian Tom Whalen referenced something said about Robert Kennedy when he died in 1968: for such a person, the sunset should never come before the afternoon. He applied those words to Tatiana.

Maria Shriver called her cousin a beautiful writer, journalist, wife, mother, daughter, sister, and friend who had built a beautiful life with her extraordinary husband and children. “She fought like a warrior,” Maria added, “and was valiant and strong and courageous.”

Thirty-eight days separated the essay’s publication from Tatiana’s death on December 30, 2025. She was 35 years old.

The John F. Kennedy Library Foundation released a brief statement announcing that their beautiful Tatiana had passed away and would always remain in their hearts. George signed it alongside their children, Edwin and Josephine, parents Ed and Caroline, siblings Jack and Rose, and brother-in-law Rory.

Chapter 9: A Life in Words

Beyond her family, Tatiana left behind substantial professional accomplishments. The New York Times employed her as a science and climate reporter, and her 2019 book, “Inconspicuous Consumption,” won the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists. Al Gore praised the book for illuminating how individuals, corporations, and governments all contribute to environmental crisis.

Tatiana took deep pride in coming from a family of writers. Her grandfather crafted speeches and authored books. Her grandmother Jackie worked as an editor. Both her parents write professionally. Tatiana chose journalism over politics, wanting to use words to create change rather than seeking office. Plans for a book about the oceans existed before she got sick. That book will never exist.

A footnote from her journalism career carries an absurd irony. In 2014, Tatiana wrote a New York Times story about a dead bear cub found in Central Park. The case went unsolved for a decade until 2024, when her cousin Robert Kennedy Jr. admitted responsibility. Tatiana’s response was dry, noting that like law enforcement, she had no idea who had done it when she wrote the piece.

Chapter 10: Family, Courage, and the Unthinkable

Rose gave her sister stem cells and months of hope. She gave Tatiana time to write her story, hold her children, and tell the people around her what they meant. The inversion 3 mutation didn’t care about any of that, because treatment resistance is built into its nature. Tatiana understood this and wrote about it without pretending things might turn out differently. Her journalism career was built on telling the truth, and she applied that same standard to her own death.

Jack Schlossberg is running for Congress now in New York’s 12th district, carrying memories of a sister he tried desperately to help and a grandfather and uncle he never got to know. The Kennedy story continues, with tragedy woven into every chapter.

Rose will spend the rest of her life knowing she did everything possible for Tatiana—hours with her arms held straight while machines extracted her cells, hours hoping those cells would take hold, hours watching them fail against a mutation that refuses to surrender. None of that diminishes what she gave. Families give everything they have while knowing it might not be enough, and they give it anyway because the alternative is unthinkable.

Epilogue: The Courage to Remember

Tatiana grasped this truth completely. Looking backward at her life and forward toward a death she couldn’t escape, she wrote about struggling to stay present with her children. Memories from her own childhood kept surfacing, and she felt like she was watching herself and her kids grow up simultaneously. Tricking herself became a survival mechanism—she would tell herself she would remember certain moments forever, even when she was dead. Even though she knew she wouldn’t, nobody could tell her what death was like or what came after. So, she kept pretending and kept trying to remember.

The Kennedy family released their statement on a Tuesday morning. With the new year approaching, another name joined a list that stretches back generations. Wealth and privilege and the best medical care available in the world couldn’t change the outcome. Rose donated her bone marrow, and it wasn’t enough to save Tatiana’s life. What it did give her sister was proof of how deeply she was loved, how much she was worth fighting for, how far her family would go to keep her alive. That might be the only thing any of us can truly offer each other.

Tatiana Telia Kennedy Schlossberg lived from May 5, 1990 to December 30, 2025. Mother, wife, daughter, sister, journalist, author. A woman who swam miles and skied marathons, who wrote books and raised children, and faced death with more courage than most people will ever need to find. She will always be in our hearts.