Tatiana Schlossberg Faces a Terminal Diagnosis

Tatiana Schlossberg comes from a family known for extraordinary gifts and unthinkable tragedy. Her grandfather was President John F. Kennedy and her mother is the only surviving member of the family who lived with him in the White House, Caroline Kennedy. Tatiana is a journalist of exceptional ability and dedication to the environment. She is married to a doctor and the mother of young children. Just after her most recent baby was born, the doctors noticed a problem with her blood. She has been in treatment for acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3, ever since. And now she has been told that her prognosis is terminal. In an essay for the New Yorker, she writes:

When you are dying, at least in my limited experience, you start remembering everything. Images come in flashes—people and places and stray conversations—and refuse to stop. I see my best friend from elementary school as we make a mud pie in her back yard, top it with candles and a tiny American flag, and watch, in panic, as the flag catches fire. I see my college boyfriend, wearing boat shoes a few days after a record-breaking snowstorm, slipping and falling into a slush puddle. I want to break up with him, so I laugh until I can’t breathe. Maybe my brain is replaying my life now because I have a terminal diagnosis, and all these memories will be lost. Maybe it’s because I don’t have much time to make new ones, and some part of me is sifting through the sands.

She writes about her family, about her treatment, about her parents and husband raising her children and how they might not remember her, about her first cousin Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., now Secretary of Health and Human Serivces, cutting half a billion dollars from the funding for the research that could have saved her and countless others. Please read it.