Last month, we reported that Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of the former President John F. Kennedy, had announced that she’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Schlossberg sadly passed away on Tuesday morning. She was only 35 years-old.
Schlossberg Passes Away
“Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts,” read a statement posted to Instagram by Schlossberg’s family. It was signed by “George, Edwin and Josephine Moran, Ed, Caroline, Jack, Rose and Rory.”
Schlossberg revealed that she’d been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in an essay that was published in The New Yorker in November of 2025. She wrote that doctors had found her cancer immediately after she gave birth to her second child, a daughter. Schlossberg and her husband George Moran are additionally parents to a son.
“I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me,” Schlossberg wrote of her diagnosis. Her treatment included 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 was supported by her parents, Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg. She was also supported by her older sister Rose and her younger brother Jack. Rose was found to be a match to donate stem cells. She then 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,” Schlossberg 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.”
Kennedy Family Tragedies
The Kennedy family has endured many tragedies over the years. President John F. Kennedy was famously assassinated in 1963. His son John F. Kennedy Jr., who was Schlossberg’s uncle, later died in a plane crash in 1999. Schlossberg admitted in her essay that she was struggling with the knowledge that her terminal cancer diagnosis was bringing more grief to her 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.”
When a doctor informed Schlossberg that she had “a year, maybe” to live, 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.
Schlossberg spent her final months trying to make memories with her children.
“Mostly, I try to live and be with them now,” she wrote. “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,” Schlossberg 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.”
Rest in peace, Tatiana Schlossberg.