Dec. 30 (UPI) — Tatiana Schlossberg, environmental journalist and granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy, died Tuesday, just over a month after revealing her terminal cancer diagnosis.
She was 35.
“Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts,” the family said in an Instagram post.
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Schlossberg was the daughter of diplomat Caroline Kennedy and artist Edwin Schlossberg. Her brother, Jack Schlossberg, is running for Congress to represent New York.
She wrote about her terminal diagnosis in The New Yorker on Nov. 22.
“During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe,” she wrote. “My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me.”
Schlossberg was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in May 2024 soon after she gave birth to her second child.
“My parents and my brother and sister, too, have been raising my children and sitting in my various hospital rooms almost every day for the last year and a half. They have held my hand unflinchingly while I have suffered, trying not to show their pain and sadness in order to protect me from it,” she wrote in her essay.
Schlossberg was a well-respected environmental journalist who worked for The New York Times and wrote for The Atlantic and The Washington Post. She published her book, Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have, in 2019.
She lamented adding more loss to her family’s lives.
“This has been a great gift, even though I feel their pain every day. 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.”
In her essay, she also mentioned her cousin, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She said that when he ran for president in 2024, he was “an embarrassment to me and the rest of my family.”
“During treatment, I learned that one of my chemotherapy drugs, cytarabine, owes its existence to an ocean animal: a sponge that lives in the Caribbean Sea, Tectitethya crypta,” she wrote in The New Yorker. “This discovery was made by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, who first synthesized the drug in 1959, and who almost certainly relied on government funding, the very thing that Bobby has already cut.”