JFK’s Granddaughter Tatiana Schlossberg Worried She Added to Family ‘Tragedy’ Before Her Death

One month before John F. Kennedy’s granddaughter Tatiana Schlossberg died, she revealed she had terminal cancer and felt she was adding to the ongoing tragedy that has plagued her famous family’s life.

The JFK Library Foundation announced Tatiana’s death at age 35 on Thursday, December 30, saying that she “passed away this morning” and “will always be in our hearts.”

In a November 22 essay for the New Yorker that discussed her battle with acute myeloid leukemia, the journalist — who shares two young children with her husband, physician George Moran — said her family was incredibly helpful after she got the news.

“My parents [Edwin Schlossberg and Caroline Kennedy] and my brother [Jack Schlossberg] and sister [Rose Schlossberg], too, have been raising my children and sitting in my various hospital rooms almost every day for the last year and a half,” Tatiana wrote.

“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,” she continued. “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.”

The professional writer was a granddaughter of the 35th president of the United States, who was assassinated in 1963, and former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Her mother, Caroline, was 5 years old when JFK was shot and killed while traveling in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas.

The Kennedy family has endured a slew of sudden and unexpected deaths, often referred to as the Kennedy curse. Aside from JFK’s assassination, his brother Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated; and his son John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, died in a plane crash.

JFK’s daughter Arabella was a stillborn, and his son Patrick died of infant respiratory distress syndrome two days after his birth. In addition, other members of the Kennedy family have died tragically or in an unforeseen manner.

Tatiana was diagnosed shortly after the birth of her daughter on May 25, 2024.

“I am not elderly — I had just turned thirty-four,” she wrote in the New Yorker. “I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me.”