The Kennedy family is deeply grieving the loss of their beloved member, Tatiana Schlossberg, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, and granddaughter of the late President John F. Kennedy. The environmental journalist passed away at the age of 35, after bravely battling cancer.
"Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning," her family shared in a statement posted on Instagram on Dec. 30. "She will always be in our hearts."
Tatiana, who also shared a son, Edwin, 3, with her husband George Moran, had revealed in an essay published in The New Yorker on Nov. 22 that she was dying from myeloid leukemia. She received the terminal diagnosis after a blood test conducted after the birth of her and George's daughter in May 2024 showed an elevated white blood cell count.
Tatiana spent five weeks in the hospital and underwent chemotherapy and two bone marrow transplants, with stem cells donated by her sister Rose Schlossberg, 37, and by an anonymous donor she knew only as a "man in his twenties from the Pacific Northwest." She was also part of two immunotherapy clinical trials.
"During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe," Tatiana wrote. "My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me. My son might have a few memories, but he’ll probably start confusing them with pictures he sees or stories he hears."
"I didn’t ever really get to take care of my daughter—I couldn’t change her diaper or give her a bath or feed her, all because of the risk of infection after my transplants," she continued. "I was gone for almost half of her first year of life. I don’t know who, really, she thinks I am, and whether she will feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother."
Tatiana also shared what she would have done in her life if things had been different, and the legacy she would leave her kids. "My plan, had I not gotten sick, was to write a book about the oceans—their destruction, but also the possibilities they offer," she noted. "My son knows that I am a writer and that I write about our planet. Since I’ve been sick, I remind him a lot, so that he will know that I was not just a sick person."
Born Tatiana Celia Kennedy Schlossberg in New York in 1990, Tatiana was the second of Caroline and Edwin's three children. Over the past decade, she pursued science and climate journalism, publishing many articles about issues such as ocean conservation, climate change, and global warming in outlets such as The New York Times and in her own newsletter, News from a Changing Planet. She also released the 2019 book Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have.
"I try to write with humility, which translates to some as a lack of expertise," Tatiana wrote on her website. "I think humility is important, especially with science: I don't know everything, and things change all the time. I think we’ve gotten ourselves into a lot of trouble as a species and a culture by not embracing uncertainty and the blurriness of ideas."
