Obituary

The award-winning writer had been battling leukemia

Tatiana Schlossberg, a journalist who covered climate change and the environment for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other publications, died Tuesday after a battle with acute myeloid leukemia. She was 35.

News of Schlossberg’s death arrived via the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation’s Instagram page, as she was the late president’s granddaughter. “Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning,” it said. “She will always be in our hearts.”

Schlossberg had most recently detailed her battle with the blood and bone marrow cancer in a New Yorker article. “I could not be cured by a standard course of treatment,” she wrote in the article, published in November. “I would need a few months, at least, of chemotherapy, which would aim to reduce the number of blast cells in my bone marrow.” Throughout the missive, she wrote several times that she couldn’t understand how she had gotten the disease.

Named in tribute to Tatiana Grossman, a lithographer for whom her father, designer Edwin Schlossberg, once worked, Tatiana Celia Kennedy Schlossberg arrived in the world on May 5, 1990, with the fanfare befitting the birth of a Kennedy. A Los Angeles Times announcement titled “2nd Girl for Caroline Kennedy,” JFK’s daughter, cited a spokeswoman for former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who said Schlossberg was born in New York and returned to her East Side Manhattan apartment. “Both mother and baby are doing well,” the rep said. “Mrs. Onassis is, of course, delighted.” Preceded by sister Rose, brother Jack arrived in 1993.

She attended the all-girls private school, the Brearley School, in New York, and largely evaded paparazzi. She also attended the Trinity School, graduating in 2008, and went on to earn a B.A. in history at Yale, where she also wrote for the Yale Herald. She stayed active with charity work during this time, too: The New York Daily News reports that in 2013, she participated in a three-mile Hudson River swim to raise funds for New York’s Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. She received a master’s degree in history from Oxford in 2014.

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That same year, she started at the Times as an intern. While there, she covered the mystery surrounding the discovery of a dead bear cub in Central Park. Her first cousin, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., while campaigning for president, claimed last year to have placed the cub there. She continued writing for the Times, with a focus on the environment, through 2017.

In 2019, she published her first book, Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have, which won the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists the following year. “Schlossberg provides a better understanding of both individual and systemic drivers of ecological destruction,” the judges wrote of the book. “Readers will find solace, humor and a route to feeling empowered with possibilities for positive change, rather than drained by an accumulation of bad news.”

At the time of her death, Schlossberg was freelancing for multiple publications and publishing a newsletter, News from a Changing Planet. A selection of articles for which she was proud is featured on her website.

In the New Yorker article about her battle with blood cancer, she wrote that she learned of the diagnosis within hours of giving birth to a daughter in May 2024. “It could just be something related to pregnancy and delivery, the doctor said, or it could be leukemia,” she wrote, adding that she told her husband, George Moran, whom she’d married in 2017, that she couldn’t believe it would be leukemia. When the diagnosis was final, and she learned it came with a rare mutation called Inversion 3, doctors asked if she’d spent time near Ground Zero. Although she grew up in New York, she hadn’t spent time close to the site of the tragedy.

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“I did not — could not — believe that [the doctors] were talking about me,” Schlossberg wrote. “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. I regularly ran five to ten miles in Central Park. I once swam three miles across the Hudson River — eerily, to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.”

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Schlossberg underwent chemotherapy and received a blood transfusion from her sister, Rose. After 50 days, she was in remission and allowed to go home, but the disease came back. She underwent more treatment. “I tried to be the perfect patient: if I did everything right, if I was nice to everyone all the time, if I didn’t need any help or have any problems, then it would work,” she wrote. Meanwhile, she also wrote about her disappointment at how her cousin, Robert Kennedy, Jr., “despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government,” had assumed a role in Trump’s administration.

She ended the op-ed with thoughts of her immediate family, dedicating paragraphs to her two children. “Mostly, I try to live and be with them now,” she wrote. Her death announcement was signed by the family that survived her: her husband George, her children Edwin and Josephine Moran, her parents Ed and Caroline, her siblings Jack and Rose, and Rose’s wife Rory McAuliffe.