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• Posted November 24, 2025

JFK’s Granddaughter Shares Terminal Cancer Diagnosis in New Personal Essay

In a powerful new essay, Tatiana Schlossberg wrote about learning she had terminal cancer at the same time she was becoming a new mother.

Schlossberg, 35, the granddaughter of former President John F. Kennedy, shared her story in The New Yorker in an essay titled “A Battle With My Blood.”

She wrote she had just given birth to her daughter in May 2024 when doctors noticed her white blood cell count was dangerously high. Further testing led to a diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia with a rare mutation called Inversion 3.

Acute myeloid leukemia is a fast-moving blood cancer that starts in the bone marrow and spreads to the blood, according to the American Cancer Society.

"During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe," Schlossberg wrote in the editorial. "My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me."

She described spending five weeks at Columbia-Presbyterian hospital in New York going through chemotherapy, and later transferring to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, one of the largest bone marrow transplant centers in the U.S., also in New York City.

In January, she began a clinical trial using CAR-T cell therapy, a type of immunotherapy that has helped some patients with blood cancers. After her cancer returned, she entered another trial.

"First, I had graft-versus-host disease, in which new cells attack old ones, and then, in late September, I was downed by a form of Epstein-Barr virus that blasted my kidneys," she wrote.

When she returned home, she said she had to relearn how to walk and could not lift her children. "My leg muscles wasted and my arms seemed whittled into bone," she added.

In the essay, Schlossberg also questioned changes to the U.S. health care system under her cousin, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She wrote that federal cuts to medical research could threaten treatment access for patients like her.

"Hundreds of NIH grants and clinical trials were cancelled, affecting thousands of patients," she said. "I worried about funding for leukemia and bone-marrow research at Memorial Sloan Kettering."

She noted that her mother, Caroline Kennedy (JFK’s daughter and former U.S. ambassador to Japan and Australia), had tried to block Kennedy’s confirmation.

Schlossberg also reflected on life, motherhood and death.

"Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I’ll remember this forever, I’ll remember this when I’m dead. Obviously, I won’t," she stated.

"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. I will keep trying to remember," she said.

Schlossberg's grandmother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, died of cancer at age 64 in 1994. Her uncle, John F. Kennedy Jr., and his wife died in a 1999 plane crash, The Washington Post reported.

More information

The American Cancer Society has more on acute myeloid leukemia (AML).

SOURCES: The Washington Post, Nov. 23, 2025; The New Yorker, Nov. 22, 2025