Tatiana Schlossberg, a lifelong seasonal Aquinnah resident and environmental journalist who garnered global attention for her essay about the distressing reality of being diagnosed with and battling against an aggressive blood cancer, died on Dec. 30 at the age of 35.
The death of Schlossberg, who was the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and the granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy, was announced on Instagram by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation in Boston. The simple message was signed by her family members and did not state where she died.
“Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts,” the post reads.
Schlossberg’s death follows a little over a month after The New Yorker published her essay titled “A Battle With My Blood,” which chronicles her diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia — which the American Cancer Society states accounts for about a third of leukemia patients and only 1 percent of all cancers — after the birth of her daughter in 2024. The piece is powerfully written and begins with her disbelief of the situation, and the struggles that followed during the various attempts at treatment and her reconciling with a level of guilt she felt in burdening her mother and her family with her illness after all the family has experienced through so much tragedy.
“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. I regularly ran five to ten miles in Central Park. I once swam three miles across the Hudson River—eerily, to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society,” Schlossberg had written. “I work as an environmental journalist, and for one article I skied the Birkebeiner, a fifty-kilometre cross-country race in Wisconsin, which took me seven and a half hours. I loved to have people over for dinner and to make cakes for my friends’ birthdays. I went to museums and plays and got to jump in a cranberry bog for my job. I had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I needed to take care of. This could not possibly be my life.”
Schlossberg was born and raised in New York, but spent a significant amount of time on the Vineyard, which is also where she married her college sweetheart George Moran, who she met at Yale University. She was editor in chief of The Yale Herald while studying history. She was an intern for the Vineyard Gazette and joined The Record in New Jersey as a reporter, where she was named Rookie of the Year by the New Jersey Society of Professional Journalists in 2012. Later, she graduated in 2014 from the University of Oxford with a master’s degree in history and then first joined The New York Times as a part of its metropolitan desk and transitioned to be a science and climate reporter.
Schlossberg left the New York paper in 2017 and published her first book, “Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have,” in 2019. The following year, the book won first place for the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Rachel Carson Environment Book Award. Before her leukemia diagnosis, she worked as a freelance environmental journalist and had planned to write a book about the oceans.
Schlossberg was also a part of the prominent Kennedy family, which has had a long history with the Vineyard and suffered a series of familial tragedies over the decades, including the death of her uncle John F. Kennedy Jr. in a 1999 plane crash in waters off of Martha’s Vineyard.
In the November essay, Schlossberg also described trying to preserve the memory of herself for her young son as she died, the environmental reporting she wouldn’t be able to do, and only being able to watch as her cousin, U.S. Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., slashed federal funds meant for health research.
Through the difficulties, she expressed gratitude to her family who stayed by her side and searched for a way to cure her.
“My parents and my brother and sister, too, have been raising my children and sitting in my various hospital rooms almost every day for the last year and a half,” she wrote at the time. “They have 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. 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. 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.”
She is survived by her parents, Edwin Schlossberg and Caroline Kennedy, her siblings Rose and Jack Schlossberg, her husband George Moran and their two young children Edwin and Josephine.
So sad…