Tatiana Schlossberg, Writer and Daughter of Caroline Kennedy, Dead at 35

Schlossberg announced her terminal cancer diagnosis in a heartbreaking November 2025 essay

Tatiana Schlossberg, the middle child of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, died on Tuesday, Dec. 30, at age 35.

The news was shared by the social media accounts for the JFK Library Foundation, on behalf of Tatiana’s extended family.

“Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts,” read the post, which was signed by “George, Edwin and Josephine Moran, Ed, Caroline, Jack, Rose and Rory.”

Tatiana Schlossberg died on Dec. 30 at the age of 35.JFK Library Foundation/Instagram

Schlossberg announced that she had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in an essay published by The New Yorker in November 2025.

She shared that doctors found the disease while she was in the hospital after giving birth to her second baby, a daughter. Schlossberg and husband George Moran, who tied the knot in 2017, also share a son.

Caroline Kennedy, Edwin Schlossberg, Tatiana Schlossberg and Jack Schlossberg attend a JFK Profile in Courage Award ceremony on Oct. 29, 2023.AP Photo/Steven Senne

“I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me,” she wrote of her diagnosis, which would require chemotherapy and a bone-marrow transplant. “I had swum a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew.”

Schlossberg wrote about receiving support from her parents, as well as her older sister, Rose, and younger brother, Jack, as she endured months of medical treatments. Rose was even a match to donate stem cells and did so for Schlossberg’s first transfusion.

“My brother was a half-match, but he still asked every doctor if maybe a half-match was better, just in case,” she wrote.

“[My family has] held my hand unflinchingly while I have suffered, trying not to show their pain and sadness in order to protect me from it. This has been a great gift, even though I feel their pain every day,” she added.

Jack and Tatiana Schlossberg watch their mother, Caroline Kennedy, be questioned by the Senate as the nominee for U.S. Ambassador to Japan on Sept. 19, 2013.ImageCatcher News Service/Corbis via Getty

Schlossberg’s mother, Caroline, was just five days away from her 6th birthday when her father, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. More than 30 years later, Caroline lost her only living sibling, John F. Kennedy Jr., in a tragic plane crash.

In her essay, Schlossberg made clear her devastation in bringing more grief to the family.

“For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry,” she wrote. “Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

Caroline Kennedy hugs daughter Tatiana outside the JFK Library on May 22, 2000.Darren McCollester/Newsmakers

Schlossberg also didn’t shy from addressing the man who she deemed an “embarrassment” to the Kennedy family: her mother’s cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was tapped as President Donald Trump’s health and human services secretary while she was fighting for her life during multiple treatments, transfusions and hospital stays.

“I watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government,” she recalled. “I watched as Bobby cut nearly a half billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers; slashed billions in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest sponsor of medical research; and threatened to oust the panel of medical experts charged with recommending preventive cancer screenings.”

Early in her diagnosis, Schlossberg recalled, she suffered a postpartum hemorrhage that nearly killed her. One of the drugs that saved her life is also used in medical abortions and, “at Bobby’s urging, is currently ‘under review’ by the Food and Drug Administration.”

“I freeze when I think about what would have happened if it had not been immediately available to me and to millions of other women who need it to save their lives or to get the care they deserve,” she wrote.

Caroline Kennedy and her children, Rose, Tatiana and Jack Schlossberg, onstage at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.Chip Somodevilla/Getty

In her final months, however, Schlossberg did her best to focus on the family that surrounded her with love — especially her husband and children.

“[George] would go home to put our kids to bed and come back to bring me dinner. I know that not everyone can be married to a doctor, but, if you can, it’s a very good idea,” she marveled in the essay. “He is perfect, and I feel so cheated and so sad that I don’t get to keep living the wonderful life I had with this kind, funny, handsome genius I managed to find.”

After hearing from a doctor that she had “a year, maybe” to live, Schlossberg shared that her first thought was that “my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me.”

“My son might have a few memories, but he’ll probably start confusing them with pictures he sees or stories he hears,” she predicted.

Tatiana Schlossberg at a book signing in 2019.Amber De Vos/Getty

Schlossberg earned a BA in History from Yale and a master’s in American history from the University of Oxford. She wrote frequently about the environment and, prior to her diagnosis, was planning a research project on ocean conservation.

“My son knows that I am a writer and that I write about our planet. Since I’ve been sick, I remind him a lot, so that he will know that I was not just a sick person,” she shared.

“I didn’t ever really get to take care of my daughter—I couldn’t change her diaper or give her a bath or feed her, all because of the risk of infection after my transplants. I was gone for almost half of her first year of life,” she explained. “I don’t know who, really, she thinks I am, and whether she will feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother.”

“Mostly, I try to live and be with them now,” Schlossberg continued. “But being in the present is harder than it sounds, so I let the memories come and go. So many of them are from my childhood that I feel as if I’m watching myself and my kids grow up at the same time.”

“Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I’ll remember this forever, I’ll remember this when I’m dead. 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. I will keep trying to remember.”