The timing could not have been crueller.

Just eleven days after Jack Schlossberg — the only grandson of President John F. Kennedy — launched his first-ever run for public office, his older sister, Tatiana Schlossberg, stepped into the public eye with a very different kind of announcement.

In a searing personal essay for The New Yorker titled “A Battle with My Blood,” the 35-year-old journalist and environmental author revealed that she is living with terminal acute myeloid leukemia, a rare and aggressive blood cancer. Doctors have told her she likely has about a year to live.

The diagnosis arrived on what should have been one of the happiest days of her life: May 25, 2024, just hours after she delivered her second child at a New York hospital. A routine blood draw showed her white blood cell count wasn’t just elevated — it was astronomically high. Further testing confirmed AML with a rare “Inversion 3” mutation often seen in much older patients, and far less responsive to standard treatment.

Since then, her life has been defined by chemotherapy, hospital stays, two stem-cell transplants, and grueling experimental therapies.

And through it all, one constant, she writes, has been her family — including her younger brother, Jack, and younger sister, Rose.

A Diagnosis That Rewrites a Family’s Story

In her essay, published on November 22, 2025 — the 62nd anniversary of JFK’s assassination — Tatiana recounts the surreal shock of learning she had cancer at the very moment she became a mother for the second time.

“I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me,” she writes, describing how she’d been swimming and running during pregnancy and saw herself as one of the healthiest people she knew. 

Within days, she went from postpartum recovery to a five-week hospital stay, separated from her newborn daughter except for fleeting, carefully managed visits. Over the months that followed, she cycled between inpatient wards and outpatient infusion chairs, enduring:

Multiple rounds of intensive chemotherapy

A bone-marrow transplant using her sister’s donated cells

A second transplant from an unrelated donor

Participation in cutting-edge clinical trials, including CAR-T cell therapy

Despite heroic efforts from her medical team at Columbia-Presbyterian and Memorial Sloan Kettering, the disease kept coming back. Early this year, doctors told her she was now in the realm of palliative treatment, with an estimated year to live.

The essay is unsparing about her physical ordeal — fluid-filled lungs, brutal side effects, the constant pendulum swings between remission and relapse. But it’s just as devastating in its emotional honesty. Tatiana confronts the particular weight of illness in a family that has already lived through more public tragedy than most.

She writes about the moment she realized she had “added a new tragedy” to her mother Caroline’s life: another child in danger, another story that might end too soon, layered atop the assassinations and accidents that have haunted the Kennedy name for generations.

“My Parents and My Brother and Sister Have Been Raising My Children”

If the essay is a record of suffering, it is just as much a love letter to the people who have carried her through it.

Tatiana describes how her husband, physician George Moran, shifted from partner to full-time caregiver and advocate — sleeping on the hospital floor, navigating insurance calls, and trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy for their children.

She writes movingly about her parents, Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, who stepped in to help raise her 3-year-old son and infant daughter when she could not be at home, and about her siblings:

“My parents and my brother and sister, too, have been raising my children and sitting in my various hospital rooms almost every day for the last year and a half. They have held my hand unflinchingly while I have suffered, trying not to show their pain and sadness in order to protect me from it.”

Her sister Rose, a filmmaker, ultimately became the donor for her first stem-cell transplant. Jack was a partial match as well, prepared to undergo the procedure if needed.

Off the page, that support has been practical as well as emotional. According to multiple reports, the siblings have helped with child care, taken shifts at the hospital, and tried to create pockets of normal childhood for Tatiana’s son and baby daughter — playground visits, bedtime routines, small rituals that anchor family life even when the adults are barely holding it together.

A Brother on the Ballot, A Sister in the Fight of Her Life

All of this is unfolding as Jack steps into his own very public role.

On November 11–12, 2025, the 32-year-old Yale and Harvard Law grad announced that he is running as a Democrat for New York’s 12th Congressional District, the Manhattan seat long held by retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler.

The district — covering much of the Upper East and Upper West Sides and Midtown — is one of the bluest, wealthiest, and most politically engaged in the country. Winning the Democratic primary there is widely seen as nearly equivalent to winning the seat itself.

Jack’s candidacy has attracted intense attention, not just for his famous last name but for his highly online persona and the question of whether he can translate viral moments into serious policy proposals. Strategists are divided: some see potential in his ability to command attention in a fragmented media landscape, while others worry his résumé is thin on public service experience.

Into that swirl of scrutiny dropped his sister’s essay.

Suddenly, the story surrounding his campaign wasn’t just about legacy and political viability. It was about mortality, caregiving, and what it means to ask voters for power while your family is fighting for something much more basic: time.

“Life Is Short — Let It Rip”

Hours after Tatiana’s essay went live, Jack responded not with a press conference, but with a simple social media post.

He shared screenshots of her piece, including its opening, and overlaid them with four words:

“Life is short — let it rip.”

The phrase appeared on an image of a rough asphalt road stretching into the distance under a vast sky — part mantra, part mission statement.

Read one way, it’s a personal tribute to his sister’s courage: a recognition that she chose to tell the world the hardest story of her life, in her own words, on her own terms. Read another, it’s also a glimpse into how he may frame his own campaign — as an all-in, nothing-left-on-the-field attempt to make meaning in the face of uncertainty.

Tatiana herself, in the essay, writes about the bitter irony of relying on a health-care system being reshaped by someone she once viewed as family ally. She calls out her cousin, now serving as Secretary of Health and Human Services, for pushing funding cuts to NIH grants and mRNA-based research that could one day yield better treatments for patients like her.

Her words are not abstract. She links those policy choices directly to canceled clinical trials and constrained options for real patients — for herself, and for the strangers whose lives are tethered to discoveries that now may come too late.

In that light, Jack’s “let it rip” can also be read as a promise: to campaign in a way that does not tiptoe around the stakes of health policy, research funding, and access to care.

Even if his platform is still taking shape, his sister’s story has already given him the most powerful argument a candidate can have for taking those issues seriously: lived experience, under his own roof.

The Shadow of Camelot, the Weight of Reality

When Tatiana writes about her illness, she cannot escape the long shadow of her family history.

Her grandfather was killed in Dallas at 46. Her uncle, John F. Kennedy Jr., died at 38 in a plane crash off Martha’s Vineyard. Now she finds herself facing a disease that disproportionately strikes older adults, with a prognosis that cuts short the future she imagined with her husband and children.

“It feels,” she suggests, like becoming another chapter in a story the world has been telling about the Kennedys for decades — a story of promise and loss, glamour and grief.

But one of the most striking things about her essay is how firmly it refuses to let “the Kennedy curse” be the main character. Instead, she turns our attention again and again to the quieter, less visible parts of the experience:

The nurses who sneak her warm blankets and gossip, who bend the rules so she can sit on the floor with her son in a hospital skyway.

The mundane appointments and transfusions that structure her days.

The teenagers playing outside the window while she lies in a bed, wondering how many of their future illnesses might be treated by drugs that don’t yet exist.

In those moments, the myth dissolves and what remains is something more universal: the fear that your children will not remember you; the guilt of feeling like a burden even when everyone insists you are not; the ache of imagining your parents watching yet another goodbye.

Love, Legacy, and the Fights Still Worth Waging

For all its darkness, Tatiana’s writing is laced with gratitude — for her doctors, for the ocean sponge that produced one of her chemotherapy drugs, for the friends and strangers who have shown up in ways large and small.

And yes, for her siblings.

“My parents and my brother and sister… have held my hand unflinchingly while I have suffered,” she writes. “This has been a great gift.”

That image — of Jack, Rose, and Caroline sitting in anonymous hospital rooms, holding hands and hiding tears — may linger longer than any campaign speech.

There is something undeniably cinematic in the juxtaposition: a Kennedy heir stepping onto the campaign trail while his sister, a respected journalist in her own right, steps into a clinical trial; a family long defined by public service now tested by the most private of battles.

But beneath the symbolism, there’s a quieter, more human story: a brother publicly backing his sister as she tells a truth that may outlast both of their careers; a family deciding to share something excruciating in the hope that it might shift how people think about illness, policy, and the value of every year that research can buy.

“Life is short — let it rip,” Jack wrote.

For Tatiana, that has meant writing honestly about fear and anger, about love and science and politics, while there is still time. For Jack, it now means running for Congress under the harshest spotlight his family has seen in years, knowing that no election outcome will matter more than what happens in a hospital room a few miles away.

For the rest of us, it’s an invitation — and a challenge.

To pay attention when patients tell us where the system is breaking.
To care who controls the budgets that determine which trials live or die.
To remember that behind every speech about “health policy” is a human being counting birthdays, transfusions, and stolen afternoons with a child who may not fully remember them.

The Kennedys have always embodied the tension between idealism and tragedy.

In 2025, that tension looks less like black-and-white footage from Dallas, and more like a young mother in a New York hospital bed, a brother launching a campaign, and a family rallying around the idea that even when the future shrinks, there are still fights worth waging — for science, for care, for one more season together.

“Let it rip,” Tatiana’s brother wrote.

In her own way, she already has.