Updated December 30, 2025 at 3:08 PM PST
Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of former president John F. Kennedy, has died after battling a rare form of blood cancer.
Schlossberg, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, was 35 years old.
Her death was announced Tuesday by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation in a social media post, reading: "Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts."
Schlossberg was a journalist and author who wrote about the environment.
She made her cancer diagnosis public in an essay, called "A Battle with My Blood," that was published on the website of The New Yorker on November 22, the 62nd anniversary of her grandfather's assassination. In the article, Schlossberg revealed that despite fighting the disease for over a year, her treatments did not result in a lasting remission and said the disease would kill her.
She is survived by her parents, her two siblings Rose and Jack, as well as her husband, George Moran, and their two children.
She announced her cancer diagnosis last month
Here's what to know about the cancer, called acute myeloid leukemia, and what else Schlossberg said in the essay.
Acute myeloid leukemia is a blood cancer. The form Schlossberg was diagnosed with is known as acute myeloid leukemia with inversion 3, a rare mutation which is most commonly seen in older patients. Schlossberg learned of her diagnosis at just 34.
"I would say acute myeloid leukemia with inversion 3 is one of the ones that most of us who manage leukemia look at as probably one of the most aggressive mutations," said Dr. Clark Alsfeld, a hematology oncologist with Ochsner MD Anderson Cancer Center in New Orleans, who specializes in leukemias and other myeloid malignancies. He's also an expert in stem cell transplantation, which was part of Schlossberg's treatment.
"It's very, very challenging to get to remission, long-term prognosis is unfortunately very short, and survival rates are much less than we see with other types of acute myeloid leukemia," Alsfeld said.
Very little is known about what causes the disease or what might increase someone's risk of getting it, according to Alsfeld. Schlossberg wrote that she didn't feel sick and the disease was discovered via blood tests on the day she gave birth to her second child. She had swum a mile in the pool the day before, she said.
"The challenge that we have with acute myeloid leukemia, patients ask all the time, 'how long did this exist?'" before it was detected, he said. "I usually tell them probably not very long. A lot of these leukemias that we have, we don't think of as something that are lingering for years and years and years before they're developed or before they're detected."
Schlossberg's rebuke of RFK Jr.
In the essay, Schlossberg also wrote about the physical and emotional pain brought about from the disease, and the anguish of seeing her loved ones share in that pain.
But the essay is not only personal. Schlossberg also offered a stinging indictment of her first cousin once removed, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
"Throughout my treatment, he had been on the national stage: previously a Democrat, he was running for President as an Independent," Schlossberg wrote. "But mostly as an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family."
She described Kennedy's history of vaccine skepticism, inexperience in the medical field, and antipathy for the funding of medical research as her gravest areas of concern.
"Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky," she wrote.
Alsfeld said stories like Schlossberg's can make a difference.
"Pieces like this are so incredibly important to help bring it home for a lot of people that might hear 'acute myeloid leukemia' and just think of a commercial on TV or something and not really be able to make it as heartfelt as that article was, and make it very real for people," he says.
Alsfeld said he hoped the article spurs renewed interest in funding for medical research, after the Trump administration moved to cut federal research grants this year.
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