Tatiana Schlossberg says she has terminal leukemia.
In a shocking and terrible essay in The New Yorker, the 34 year old daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg writes that she is dying.
Schlossberg is also the granddaughter of the late President John F. Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Schlossberg’s essay can be found here.
The fate of this family devoted to public service is horrific. In her life, Caroline Kennedy has seen her father assassinated. Her mother died relatively young from cancer. Her brother perished in a plane accident. Now this.
Tatiana is a young mother. She was a New York Times reporter. She has/had her whole life to look forward to.
In the essay, she rips her cousin, Robert Kennedy Jr, for being anti-vaccine and shutting down health programs.
She writes: “As I spent more and more of my life under the care of doctors, nurses, and researchers striving to improve the lives of others, I watched as Bobby cut nearly a half billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers…”
I can’t help thinking this may have contributed to the absolute craziness of her brother, Jack, on social media. Tatiana says when she needed a transplant, her sister Rosemary was a match. Jack was a half match, “but he still asked every doctor if maybe a half-match was better, just in case.”
Tatiana writes: “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. 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.”
