A new grief overwhelms the Kennedys, in what appears to be yet another example of the curse that has plagued the famous American family for decades.
Tatiana Schlossberg, daughter of Caroline Kennedy and granddaughter of JFK, died at the age of 35 from terminal leukemia, which she had publicly announced last November .
Thirty-five-year-old journalist, Caroline and Edwin Schlossberg's second child, described her ordeal, which began with the discovery of her disease during childbirth, involving two bone marrow transplants, brief glimpses of hope, and then increasingly aggressive experimental treatments. The story was featured in a New Yorker essay, "The Battle Against My Blood," published on the 62nd anniversary of her grandfather JFK's assassination: no coincidence.
"All my life I've tried to be good to spare my mother further suffering," she wrote, aware of being part of a clan marked by fate: "Now I've added a new tragedy to her life, to that of our family, and there's nothing I can do to prevent it." Caroline was 5 when her father was killed, 10 when her uncle RFK was murdered, 41 when her brother John died in a plane crash on Martha's Vineyard with his wife, Carolyn Bessette.
Tatiana's illness is acute myeloid leukemia with a rare mutation, Inversion 3, found in less than 2% of cases, especially among elderly patients. In her essay, Tatiana links her personal tragedy to the disasters inflicted on the American healthcare system by her mother's cousin, RFK Jr.: "He is an embarrassment to me," she writes of Donald Trump's Secretary of Health, "and to the rest of my immediate family."
Tatiana's ordeal began in May 2024, just hours after giving birth to her second child. "I couldn't, I couldn't believe they were talking about me," she wrote of the doctors who had noticed abnormalities in her blood tests: "The day before, I had swum a mile in the pool. I wasn't sick. I was one of the healthiest people I knew." In her essay, Schlossberg recounts the arduous therapeutic journey and the treatments that proved futile.
