Tatiana Schlossberg, an accomplished environmental journalist and the granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy, died on the morning of December 30, 2025, at the age of 35. Her death was announced by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, which shared a heartfelt message on social media: "Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts." The news marked another tragic chapter for a family whose history has been marked by both extraordinary public service and personal loss.
Schlossberg’s journey through illness was both public and deeply personal. In an essay published in The New Yorker on November 22, 2025—62 years to the day after her grandfather’s assassination—she revealed that she had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a rare mutation known as Inversion 3, in May 2024. The diagnosis came just after she gave birth to her second child. She described the shock of her diagnosis, writing, “During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe. My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me.”
Schlossberg’s essay in The New Yorker was both a chronicle of her medical battle and a meditation on the meaning of memory, motherhood, and mortality. She admitted to the difficulty of living in the present with her family, especially her young children. “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. 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,” she wrote. Despite the pain, she tried to focus on the moments she could share: “But being in the present is harder than it sounds, so I let the memories come and go. So many of them are from my childhood that I feel as if I’m watching myself and my kids grow up at the same time. Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I’ll remember this forever, I’ll remember this when I’m dead. Obviously, I won’t. But since I don’t know what death is like and there’s no one to tell me what comes after it, I’ll keep pretending. I will keep trying to remember.”
Her diagnosis followed the birth of her daughter in May 2024, when a doctor noticed an abnormally high white blood cell count. She spent five weeks at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York before beginning chemotherapy at home and later undergoing a bone marrow transplant. Despite grueling treatments, including participation in a clinical trial for CAR T-cell therapy and immunotherapy, her cancer returned. “Maybe my brain is replaying my life now because I have a terminal diagnosis, and all these memories will be lost. Maybe it’s because I don’t have much time to make new ones, and some part of me is sifting through the sands,” she reflected in her essay.
Schlossberg was the second of three children born to Caroline Kennedy, former U.S. Ambassador to Australia and Japan, and Edwin Schlossberg, an artist and designer. Her siblings, Rose and Jack, survive her. Jack Schlossberg, her younger brother, is currently running for Congress in New York. Tatiana married George Moran in September 2017, after the two met as undergraduates at Yale. Together, they had two children: a son born in 2022 and a daughter born in May 2024.
Her family’s story is one of both public achievement and private sorrow. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, when Caroline was just five years old. John F. Kennedy Jr., Tatiana’s uncle, died in a plane crash in 1999. Schlossberg herself was acutely aware of the weight of family history. “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 wrote.
Before her illness, Schlossberg built a respected career as a climate journalist and author. She wrote for The New York Times and contributed to The Atlantic and The Washington Post. Her book, Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have, published in 2019, won the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Rachel Carson Environment Book Award in 2020. The judging panel praised her work, saying readers "will find solace, humor and a route to feeling empowered with possibilities for positive change." In interviews, Schlossberg emphasized the urgency and universality of the climate crisis. “I think climate change is the biggest story in the world, and it’s a story about everything,” she told NBC News in 2019. “It’s about science and nature, but it’s also about politics and health and business. To me, looking at this as a journalist, it seemed like a really important story to tell. And if I could help communicate about it, that might inspire other people to get involved and work on the issue.”
Her reporting was marked by a sense of adventure and commitment. For one assignment, she completed a 30-mile, seven-hour cross-country ski race in Wisconsin. In December 2021, she reported on efforts to harness energy from the London Underground to heat homes, highlighting innovative approaches to fighting climate change.
Schlossberg’s final months were also marked by candid reflections on family and politics. In her essay, she criticized her cousin, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for his skepticism of vaccines and his public health policies. “I watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government,” she wrote. She expressed worry about her own ability to access vaccines as an immunocompromised patient, given his stance.
Maria Shriver, a journalist and commentator who is also part of the Kennedy family, paid tribute to Schlossberg as “valiant, strong, courageous.” Shriver described her as “the light, the humor, the joy,” and went on to say, “She was smart, wicked smart, as they say, and sassy. She was fun, funny, loving, caring, a perfect daughter, sister, mother, cousin, niece, friend, all of it…”
Tatiana Schlossberg is survived by her husband, George Moran; their young son and daughter; her parents, Caroline Kennedy and Ed Schlossberg; and her siblings Rose and Jack. She leaves behind a legacy of thoughtful journalism, personal resilience, and a commitment to making the world a better place, even as she faced her own mortality with honesty and grace.
Schlossberg’s story, marked by courage and compassion, reminds us just how intertwined the personal and the political can be—and how even in the face of overwhelming challenges, one person’s voice can spark hope and change.
