Tatiana Schlossberg — the middle child of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg and the granddaughter of former President John F. Kenney — died on Tuesday, December 30.
She was 35 years old.
The tragic news came just after a month since Schlossberg told the world she had been diagnosed with cancer.
The passing was shared by the social media accounts for the JFK Library Foundation… on behalf of Tatiana’s extended family.
“Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts,” read the post, which was signed by George, Edwin and Josephine Moran, Ed, Caroline, Jack, Rose and Rory.
In November, Schlossberg announced that she had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia via an essay published by The New Yorker.
“My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me,” she wrote at the time.
Schlossberg explained in this piece that doctors found the disease while she was in the hospital after giving birth to her second baby, a daughter. She and husband George Moran, who got married in 2017, also share a son.
I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me,” Schlossberg wrote of her diagnosis, which would require 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’s well-known family has endured numerous personal tragedies.
Her grandfather, President Kennedy, was assassinated in 1963; and her uncle, John F Kennedy Jr, died in a plane crash in 1999.
“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,” Tatiana wrote last month.
“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.”
Schlossberg also didn’t shy from addressing the man who she deemed an “embarrassment” to the Kennedy family: her mother’s cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was chosen to serve as President Donald Trump’s health and human services secretary while she was fighting for her life during multiple treatments, transfusions and hospital stays.
“I try to live and be with them now,” Schlossberg wrote of her children a few weeks ago. “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.”