Tatiana Schlossberg, Daughter of Caroline Kennedy, Shares Acute Myeloid Leukemia Diagnosis

Tatiana Schlossberg, the 35-year-old daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, has revealed that she has been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and has been told the disease is terminal.

In an essay published by The New Yorker on Saturday, Nov. 22, Schlossberg wrote that she first learned something was wrong shortly after giving birth to her second child in May 2024. A routine check following delivery showed a concerning spike in her white blood cell count.

“A few hours later, my doctor noticed that my blood count looked strange. A normal white-blood-cell count is around four to eleven thousand cells per microliter. Mine was a hundred and thirty-one thousand cells per microliter,” she wrote.

At the time, her doctor said the abnormal results could have been related to pregnancy and delivery — or could indicate leukemia. Further testing eventually confirmed the latter, along with a rare genetic mutation known as Inversion 3.

Schlossberg explained that her diagnosis changed the scope of what treatment could realistically achieve. “I could not be cured by a standard course,” she wrote, describing how doctors initially anticipated months of chemotherapy followed by a bone-marrow transplant. The news felt unreal, she said, especially because she had felt healthy right up to the birth.

“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,” she wrote.

Schlossberg and her husband, George Moran — whom she married in 2017 — are parents to a 3-year-old son and a 1-year-old daughter. In her essay, she reflected on how quickly her life shifted from caring for a newborn to navigating intensive cancer treatment.

After spending five weeks at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital following delivery, she was transferred to Memorial Sloan Kettering for a bone-marrow transplant and later continued chemotherapy at home. In January, she joined a clinical trial using CAR-T cell therapy, a form of immunotherapy designed to fight certain blood cancers. Despite these efforts, her doctor later told her she likely has less than a year to live.

Throughout the essay, Schlossberg highlighted the steady presence of her family during her illness, especially her husband. “George did everything for me that he possibly could. He talked to all the doctors and insurance people that I didn’t want to talk to; he slept on the floor of the hospital,” she wrote.

She also described the way her parents and siblings have stepped in to help raise her children and accompany her through long hospital stays. “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. “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.”

Schlossberg acknowledged the emotional weight her illness has placed on her family, particularly her mother. “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,” she wrote. “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.”

As she faces what comes next, Schlossberg said she is trying to focus on her children and the daily moments she still has with them. “Mostly, I try to live and be with them now,” she wrote. “But being in the present is harder than it sounds, so I let the memories come and go.”