‘This could not possibly be my life’—JFK kin Tatiana Schlossberg's wrote on her fight with cancer, a month before death | Today News

Environmental journalist Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of former President John F Kennedy, passed away on Tuesday, a month after she revealed in an essay that she had been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. Schlossberg was 35.

The journalist's death was announced on Instagram by the John F Kennedy Library Foundation, but did not reveal details about where she passed.

As tributes poured in, netizens remembered Schlossberg's harrowing essay and the journalist's courage and honesty in describing her battle with terminal illness.

Titled 'A Battle With My Blood', the essay was published by The New Yorker on 22 November, coinciding with the 62nd anniversary of JFK's assassination.

In her essay, Schlossberg revealed that she had learnt of her cancer after the birth of her daughter in May 2024.

Recounting her diagnosis, Schlossberg wrote, "My husband, George, and I held her and stared at her and admired her newness. A few hours later, my doctor noticed that my blood count looked strange. A normal white-blood-cell count is around four thousand to eleven thousand cells per microlitre. Mine was a hundred and thirty-one thousand cells per microlitre. It could just be something related to pregnancy and delivery, the doctor said, or it could be leukemia."

Incredulous, Schlossberg told her husband that it couldn't be leukemia, but hours later, doctors confirmed that she was dying.

The journalist recounted in excruciating detail how a moment of joy quickly spiralled into gloom—"My daughter was carried off to the nursery. My son didn’t want to leave; he wanted to drive my hospital bed like a bus. I said goodbye to him and my parents and was wheeled away."

Schlossberg went on to reveal that she had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3.

"I could not be cured by a standard course of treatment. I would need a few months, at least, of chemotherapy, which would aim to reduce the number of blast cells in my bone marrow," wrote Schlossberg.

"I did not—could not—believe that they were talking about me. 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," the journalist wrote, describing her disbelief, adding, "This could not possibly be my life."

She recalled how she tried to find "humor" in the situation—"I didn't know what else to do."

"I decided that everyone in the hospital had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and I was their target. It was a joke that I found funnier than everyone else did. Later, when I was bald and had a scrape on my face from a fall, my joke was that I was a busted-up Voldemort," Schlossberg wrote.

She also detailed "indignities and humiliations", including how she almost bled to death following postpartum hemorrhage.

Schlossberg also heaped praise on her nurses and her family, who did everything in their power to bestow her with a sense of normalcy: "My son came to visit almost every day. When friends heard that I liked Spindrift seltzer, they sent cases of it; they also sent pajamas and watercolor kits and good gossip," wrote the journalist.

"The nurses brought me warm blankets and let me sit on the floor of the skyway with my son, even though I wasn’t supposed to leave my room. They ate up the gossip that I gathered; they looked the other way when they saw that I had a contraband teakettle and toaster. They told me about their kids and their dating lives and their first trips to Europe. I have never encountered a group of people who are more competent, more full of grace and empathy, more willing to serve others than nurses," she added.

Schlossberg also described how her sister Rose donated her cells for a stem-cell transplant, a last ditch effort to cure her.

However, after the transplant, while she was undergoing chemo, her hair fell out. As Schlossberg started wearing scarves to cover her bare heard, her son, as well as her brother Jack, joined in, in a gesture of solidarity.

The journalist recalled the pain of not being able to fully care for her newborn daughter because of the risk of infection.

"I don’t know who, really, she thinks I am," Schlossberg wrote, airing doubts about "whether she will feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother."

Although Schlossberg briefly went into remission, she relapsed, and the cycle continued: blood transfusions, another stem cell transplant, and more chemotherapy. Remission, then relapse.

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

She also described the pain of adding a "new tragedy" to her mother Caroline Kennedy's life.

"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. 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," Schlossberg wrote.

The journalist also recalled the difficulty of trying to live a normal life, knowing she was about to die.

"Mostly, I try to live and be with them now. But being in the present is harder than it sounds, so I let the memories come and go," Schlossberg wrote.

"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," she concluded.

Born on May 5, 1990, Schlossberg was the middle child of JFK's daughter Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, a digital designer.

She studied history at Yale University and did her post-graduation from Oxford in 2014.

After completing her education, Schlossberg went on to work for The New York Times, and wrote for several other reputed publications, including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and Bloomberg News.

She also published a book in 2019, titled Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have.