Tatiana Schlossberg, an environmental journalist and the daughter of Caroline Kennedy, died on Tuesday at the age of 35. Her death was confirmed in a statement shared on Instagram by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation and signed by her family. No location or cause of death was specified.
Ms. Schlossberg, the granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy, drew international attention late last year after publishing a deeply personal essay in The New Yorker describing her battle with an aggressive and rare form of leukemia. The essay, released online on November 22 — the anniversary of her grandfather’s assassination — was widely praised for its emotional honesty and courage.
In the piece, titled “A Battle With My Blood,” Ms. Schlossberg recounted learning of her illness shortly after the birth of her daughter in May 2024. What began as concern over irregular blood test results quickly escalated into a devastating diagnosis. Her doctor initially suggested the abnormality could be linked to pregnancy but warned it might also be leukemia. Further testing confirmed cancer, including a rare mutation.
At the time of her diagnosis, Ms. Schlossberg had a newborn daughter and a 2-year-old son. She wrote that the news felt impossible to accept, especially given her physical condition before the diagnosis. She described herself as active and healthy, noting that she had been swimming and running long distances throughout her pregnancy and had once completed a multi-mile swim across the Hudson River to raise money for leukemia research.
She wrote that the diagnosis felt unreal and incompatible with the life she believed she was living.
Over the following months, Ms. Schlossberg underwent intensive chemotherapy while also coping with a life-threatening postpartum hemorrhage that nearly killed her. She later received a stem cell transplant, which she described as a last-ditch effort to save her life. Her older sister, Rose Schlossberg, was a full donor match and provided the stem cells. Her brother, Jack Schlossberg, who is currently running for Congress in New York’s 12th District, was a partial match and pushed doctors to see if he could donate as well, though he ultimately could not.
After the transplant, Ms. Schlossberg lost her hair. Her brother shaved his head in solidarity, and when her young son visited her in the hospital, he wore a scarf like hers.
Because of the high risk of infection, Ms. Schlossberg was unable to care for her infant daughter in the usual ways. She wrote that she could not feed, bathe, or diaper her child and spent nearly half of her daughter’s first year away from home due to treatment.
She expressed deep uncertainty about her relationship with her daughter, wondering whether the child would recognize her as her mother or remember her at all.
Though she briefly went into remission, the cancer returned. She endured additional chemotherapy, joined clinical trials, received blood transfusions, and underwent a second stem cell transplant using cells from an unrelated donor. She experienced repeated relapses and complications, including graft-versus-host disease, a condition in which transplanted cells attack the recipient’s body. She also contracted a form of the Epstein-Barr virus.
By October, after another hospital stay, she was so weak that she could not lift her children. Her oncologist later told her that he might be able to extend her life for another year.
In her essay, Ms. Schlossberg reflected on the emotional toll her illness had taken on her family, particularly her mother. She wrote about her lifelong effort to be a good daughter and avoid causing pain, and how her illness felt like another tragedy added to a family long marked by loss.
The Kennedy family has endured decades of public tragedy. Caroline Kennedy was five years old when her father was assassinated in 1963 and ten when her uncle Robert F. Kennedy was killed in 1968. In 1999, her brother, John F. Kennedy Jr., died in a plane crash along with his wife and sister-in-law. Tatiana Schlossberg had been a flower girl at his wedding just three years earlier.
Despite growing up in the public eye, Ms. Schlossberg largely succeeded in keeping her own children out of the spotlight, raising them with a sense of normalcy and a commitment to public service that reflected her family’s legacy.
Tatiana Celia Kennedy Schlossberg was born on May 5, 1990, in Manhattan. She was the middle child of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, an interactive media designer. She attended the Brearley School and Trinity School in New York City before studying history at Yale University, where she graduated in 2012. She later earned a master’s degree in history from Oxford University in 2014.
While at Yale, she served as editor of The Yale Herald. She began her journalism career at The Record of northern New Jersey and was named Rookie of the Year in 2012 by the New Jersey Society of Professional Journalists. She joined The New York Times in 2014, initially working on the metropolitan desk before becoming a science and climate reporter.
Her reporting covered a wide range of topics, from local disputes and crime to natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy. She also wrote lighter and unusual stories, including coverage of New York Harbor’s ice-breaking boats and the unexplained discovery of a dead bear cub in Central Park — a mystery later revealed by The New Yorker to have involved her cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
In her New Yorker essay, Ms. Schlossberg sharply criticized her cousin, who currently serves as Secretary of Health and Human Services, calling his leadership an embarrassment to her and her immediate family. She expressed alarm over cuts to medical research funding, including reductions affecting institutions like Columbia University, where her husband, George Moran, is a urologist and assistant professor. She also condemned cuts to mRNA vaccine research and raised concerns about regulatory scrutiny of medications that had played a role in saving her life.
Ms. Schlossberg was the author of the 2019 book Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have, which explored how everyday consumer behavior contributes to climate change. The book received the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists in 2020. She hoped the book would empower readers to make practical changes rather than feel overwhelmed by climate anxiety.
She believed climate change to be fundamentally an issue of justice, writing that environmental damage worsens inequality and harms both people and ecosystems.
Ms. Schlossberg is survived by her parents, her siblings, her husband, whom she married in 2017, and their two young children. Before becoming ill, she had been preparing to begin reporting on a second book focused on climate change and the oceans.
During her treatment, she learned that one of the chemotherapy drugs she received was derived from compounds originally discovered in sea sponges, research that had been funded decades earlier by government grants. She noted the irony that the same public funding now under threat had once made her treatment possible.
She wrote that protecting the planet and protecting people are inseparable goals — and that saving one without the other is impossible.