Tragedy has struck the Kennedys again. Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of the American president, died this Tuesday at the age of 35, as reported by the family through their social networks. In November, Schlossberg announced that he was suffering from a rare type of blood cancer and that doctors gave him less than a year to live. She was the daughter of the artist Edwin Schlossberg and the diplomat Caroline Kennedy, the first-born of the former US president.
Journalist specialized in environmental issues and mother of two children, a newborn baby and another two-year-old boy, announced that she suffered from a particularly aggressive leukemia in an extensive and heartbreaking essay published in the magazine The New Yorkerwhere he also launched a bitter criticism against the health policies implemented by his cousin, the US Secretary of Health, in the Donald Trump Administration. Schlossberg attacked his cousin for his rejection of medical research and government-funded vaccines.
The article generated a wave of solidarity for her bravery in announcing her illness and sharing the details of her struggle. As reported in the forum entitled A battle with my blooddoctors discovered her illness when she gave birth to her young daughter in May last year and observed, in a blood test, that her white blood cell count was abnormally high. “It could be something related to pregnancy and childbirth, or it could be leukemia,” the doctor told her, according to the story in the article signed by her a month ago.
Kennedy’s granddaughter had a hard time accepting the illness. He exercised regularly, ran five to ten miles regularly in Central Park, lived a healthy life, and took care of himself.
Schlossberg carefully described 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 certain doses of humor, Schlossberg also narrated the side effects of the treatment and the help she received from doctors – her husband is one –, nurses and family members in those days. Among them, his brother Jack, who recently served in the US Congress.
Caroline Kennedy’s daughter, JFK’s only living child, starkly described her struggle with the disease. In the story, she detailed how she gained hope after receiving a stem cell transplant from her younger sister, Rose Schlossberg. His brother, Jack, also tried to lend him his cells, but he was not a 100% match and the doctors rejected the donation. But during these months he stayed close to his sister. When Tatiana’s hair fell out from chemotherapy treatment, Jack shaved his head in solidarity.
Tatiana Celia Kennedy Schlossberg, as she was officially called, was born on May 5, 1990 in Manhattan. He studied at Brearley School and Trinity School, some of the most elite private schools in the city.
His mother, Caroline Kennedy, lawyer, writer, lawyer and diplomat. She was ambassador of Japan, during the Government of Barack Obama; and in Australia, under Joe Biden, he strove to keep his three children away from his family’s media spotlight, but provided them with an exclusive education.
Tatiana graduated in history from Yale and Oxford before starting her journalistic career at the newspaper Record of New Jersey, covering local events and issues. He joined the New York Times in 2014 as an intern. She worked as an editor for the local section before moving to science, where she developed as an environmental journalist. He wrote about stories that had political implications and that allowed him to get involved in the story.
He was very aware of climate change and wrote a book titled Discrete Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Didn’t Know You Hada sort of consumer guide to how human behavior negatively affects the climate. Now he was preparing another essay for his second book, focused on climate change and the oceans.
