JFK's granddaughter Tatiana Schlossberg dies aged 35

Tatiana Schlossberg, the second-oldest granddaughter of John F Kennedy, the first Irish American Catholic President of the United States, died on Tuesday morning, December 30, at the age of 35.

Her death comes just over a month after she revealed in an essay for The New Yorker that she had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in May 2024.

"Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning," the JFK Library Foundation said in a brief statement on social media on Tuesday.

"She will always be in our hearts."

The statement is signed by her husband, George Moran, their two children, Edwin and Josephine Moran, her parents, Edwin Schlossberg and Caroline Kennedy, and her siblings, Rose and Jack.

In her New Yorker essay, Schlossberg wrote that her doctors first noticed her "blood count looked strange" almost immediately after she gave birth to her daughter in May 2024.

"The diagnosis was acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3," she wrote, adding, "I could not be cured by a standard course of treatment."

Schlossberg described her shock at the diagnosis, particularly because she "didn’t feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew."

Chronicling her grueling treatment, Schlossberg paid tribute to her husband, whom she married in 2017: "He is perfect, and I feel so cheated and so sad that I don’t get to keep living the wonderful life I had with this kind, funny, handsome genius I managed to find."

She praised her parents and siblings who were at her side, before emotionally acknowledging: "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 recalled how, when she was in the hospital earlier this year for her second transplant, she sought inspiration from an Irish poet: "I dutifully copied Seamus Heaney poems into my notebook: 'The Cure at Troy' ('Believe that a further shore / Is reachable from here. / Believe in miracles / And cures and healing wells.') and 'The Gravel Walks' ('So walk on air against your better judgement')."

Schlossberg also reiterated her and her immediate family's criticism of her cousin Robert F Kennedy, Jr, who was confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services "in the face of logic and common sense ... despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government."