Misfortune strikes the Kennedy clan again. On the 62nd anniversary of the president’s assassination, his granddaughter Tatiana Schlossberg, 35, daughter of Caroline Kennedy, has revealed that she has terminal cancer and doctors give her less than a year to live.
Schlossberg, a journalist specializing in environmental issues and mother of two children, announced that she suffers from a particularly aggressive leukemia in a column published this Saturday in the New Yorker magazine, in which she also launches a bitter criticism against the health policies implemented by her cousin, the US Secretary of Health.
According to the article A battle with my blooddoctors discovered her illness when she gave birth to her baby daughter in May last year and saw, in a blood test, that her white blood cell count was abnormally high. Schlossberg carefully describes the treatments, conventional and experimental, to which she has been subjected since then to try to cure her: two spinal cord stem cell transplants, long sessions of chemotherapy, and immunotherapy, among them. With humor, she also narrates her side effects and the help she received from doctors (her husband is one), nurses and family. Among them, his brother Jack, who recently served in the US Congress.
That help “has been a great gift, although I feel her pain every day. All my life I have tried to be good, a good student, a good sister and a good daughter, and tried to protect my mother, and never make her sad or angry. Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to the life of our family, and I can’t do anything to stop it,” writes the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and designer Edwin Schlossberg.
Caroline Kennedy, 67, the former US ambassador to Australia and Japan, was five years old when her father was murdered in Dallas. His uncle, Robert F Kennedy, was also assassinated five years later. His brother, John F Kennedy junior, known during his childhood as John Johndied along with his wife, Caroline Bessette, when the small plane he was piloting en route to the island of Martha’s Vineyard crashed in the waters off the coast of Massachusetts.
Humor and melancholy give way to rage in the second part of the article, in which he draws a parallel between the phases of his treatment and his cousin’s political career in the last year and a half: from being an independent presidential candidate with no possibilities, viewed with skepticism among his own family and the Democratic Party for his anti-vaccine positions, he went on to support Donald Trump and be part of his campaign; from there, to be proposed, and confirmed in the Senate, as Secretary of Health last January.
“Suddenly, the health system on which she depended felt strained and fragile. Doctors and scientists at Columbia (the university to which the hospital that treated her is attached) did not know if they would be able to continue their research, or even keep their jobs,” he recalls. Columbia was one of the first targets of the Trump Administration in its crusade against alleged anti-Semitism on college campuses; In May, the institution laid off 180 researchers as a result of the cuts imposed by the Republican.
Schlossberg adds more details: “As I spent more and more of my life under the care of doctors, nurses, and researchers fighting to improve the lives of others, I watched Bobby cut nearly half a billion dollars in messenger RNA vaccines, a technology that can be used against some cancers; eliminate billions of dollars in funding for the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest funder of medical research; and threaten to fire the panel of medical experts responsible for recommending preventative cancer screening tests. “Hundreds of clinical trials and research grants were cancelled, something that has affected thousands of patients.”
His article concludes with a declaration of love for his children, and the disbelief aroused by the thought that he will not see them grow up. “Sometimes I deceive myself into thinking that I will remember all this (the experiences with her children) forever, that I will remember it when I am dead. Obviously, that will not be the case. But since I don’t know what death is like, and there is no one to tell me what happens next, I will continue to deceive myself. I will continue trying to remember.”
