Tatiana Schlossberg’s Terminal Cancer Diagnosis

On 22 November 2025, Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of former U.S. president John F. Kennedy, revealed that she had been diagnosed with terminal cancer in an essay she wrote in The New Yorker magazine. The 35 year-old journalist disclosed that she had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and has less than a year to live.

Schlossberg shared that she was diagnosed in May 2024, on the same day that she gave birth to her second child. A few hours after her delivery, her doctor noticed that her white blood cell count was abnormally high. After subsequent tests, Schlossberg was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), with a rare mutation known as Inversion 3.

AML is a type of blood cancer that originates from the bone marrow. It is a rare and aggressive form of cancer.

Schlossberg was shocked when she first received her diagnosis. “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,” she wrote.

In her essay, Schlossberg documented her brutal treatment journey. She wrote, “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. Then I would need a bone-marrow transplant, which could cure me. After the transplant, I would probably need more chemotherapy, on a regular basis, to try to prevent the cancer from returning.”

She underwent several rounds of chemotherapy, two bone marrow transplants and participated in two clinical trials. Due to the nature of her cancer, she found herself repeatedly slipping in and out of remission. She also had other obstacles along the way, having been diagnosed with graft-versus-host disease after her second bone marrow transplant. She was also diagnosed with a form of Epstein-Barr virus that affected her kidneys and made her have to learn how to walk again.

However, despite all of her treatments, Schlossberg’s cancer kept returning. During her latest clinical trial, her doctor had told her that he could only possibly keep her alive for another year.

Schlossberg wrote emotionally in her essay about her thoughts after being diagnosed with cancer. The environmental journalist shared about the dreams she could not achieve due to her cancer. “My plan, had I not gotten sick, was to write a book about the oceans — their destruction, but also the possibilities they offer,” she wrote. “I won’t write about cytarabine. I won’t find out if we were able to harness the power of the oceans, or if we let them boil and turn into a garbage dump.”

However, the things that worried her the most was her family. She shared that she was thankful for the support she had from her family while she was bed-ridden in the hospital undergoing various treatments. Still, she has a 3 year-old son and 1 year-old daughter and she feared that she could not be the mother they needed.

“Mostly, I try to live and be with [my kids] now. 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.”