Tatiana Schlossberg obit

Tatiana Schlossberg Dies: Environmental Journalist & JFK’s Granddaughter Was 35

 

She was not on the list.

Environmental journalist and granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy Tatiana Schlossberg has died. She was 35.

Schlossberg’s family posted the news on Instagram via the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Foundation account.

“Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning,” the post’s caption reads. “She will always be in our hearts.”

The statement is signed by Schlossberg’s parents, Edwin Schlossberg and Caroline Kennedy, as well as her siblings, Jack and Rose.

The middle child and second daughter of Edwin Schlossberg and Carlone Kennedy revealed her terminal leukemia diagnosis in a New Yorker essay published in November 2025. Doctors discovered the acute myeloid leukemia shortly after she gave birth to her daughter in May 2024.

“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 in her New Yorker essay, titled The Battle With My Blood, recalling her reaction to the diagnosis.

She also revealed in that essay that a postpartum hemorrhage almost killed her following the birth of her daughter. She recounted her time at Columbia-Presbytarian and later Memorial Sloan Kettering. She also did a round of at-home chemotherapy. Her sister turned out to be a match for donating stem cells.

In the essay, Schlossberg remembered watching her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. get nominated and confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services “in the face of logic and common sense.” She drew connections between watching RFK “cut nearly half a billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines” and her experience being cared for by doctors and nurses.

Schlossberg formerly wrote about climate and the environment for The New York Times. Her book, Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have, published in August 2019. She was planning to write a book about oceans — their destruction and also their opportunities — before she got sick. In mentioning this, she called out one of her chemotherapy drugs, cytarabine, which exists thanks to the sponge Tectitethya crypta that lives in the Caribbean sea.

She is survived by her husband and their two children, Edwin and Josephine.