On the bleak cold afternoon of Monday, Jan. 5, Caroline Kennedy laid her 35-year-old daughter, Tatiana Schlossberg, to rest. Dressed in a black wool suit, Caroline walked into the limestone church of St. Ignatius Loyola in New York City accompanied by her husband, Ed Schlossberg, 80, and their children, Rose, 37, and Jack, 32. They were preceded by Tatiana’s widower, George Moran, 36, and their children, 3-year-old Edwin, wearing a tiny blue blazer, and 1-year-old Josephine, who Caroline later gently held in her arms. Six days earlier, the family had announced the death of their “beautiful Tatiana,” writing, “She will always be in our hearts.” Her cousin Maria Shriver marveled at her bravery: “She fought like a warrior. She was valiant, strong, courageous… a perfect daughter, sister, mother, cousin, niece, friend, all of it.”

It was yet another unimaginable loss to befall the storied political dynasty: not only that of a young woman leaving behind her husband and their two small children, but also of her famously private mother, Caroline, 68, who had already lived through the assassinations of her father, President John F. Kennedy, followed by her uncle Robert F. Kennedy and the death of her younger brother, John, in a fatal plane crash.
Tatiana herself addressed the depth of sadness and generational trauma in a heart-wrenching essay for The New Yorker in November, when she first disclosed she was battling an aggressive blood cancer. “For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry,” she admitted. “Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.” Says Kennedy historian Steven M. Gillon: “When you think about the losses Caroline has suffered, it was only [her brother] John that had suffered the same — and then she lost John. For Caroline, it’s a series of horrible personal tragedies that lead up to what may be the hardest of them all.”

A passionate environmental journalist and author, Schlossberg had just given birth to Josephine on May 25, 2024, at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where her husband is a urologist, when doctors noticed a massive spike in her white blood cell count and diagnosed her with acute myeloid leukemia and a rare mutation called Inversion 3, found in “less than one to two percent” of patients with that disease, and most often in patients over 60, says Dr. Courtney DiNardo, a leukemia specialist at the MD Anderson Cancer Center who was not involved in her care.

Tatiana was shocked by the diagnosis. “I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew. I regularly ran five to ten miles in Central Park,” she wrote. “I had a son who I loved more than anything and a new baby I needed to take care of. This could not possibly be my life.” The next year and a half was a marathon of chemotherapy rounds, stem cell transplants (one from her older sister, Rose, and another from an anonymous donor) and infections, all while undergoing several clinical trials. When her long wavy hair fell out, she covered her head with scarves, “remembering vainly each time I tied one on, how great my hair used to be,” she noted. In solidarity, her brother, Jack, now running for Congress in New York, shaved his head.

Before long, Tatiana’s husband and kids — known as Eddie and Josie — moved into her parents’ N.Y.C. apartment on Park Avenue. Tatiana’s body was so ravaged (she had lost 30 lbs.) and the risk of infection was so great, she couldn’t bathe or feed her daughter. “I couldn’t pick up my children,” she wrote. She wondered if her son might later confuse the few memories he had of her “with pictures he sees or stories he hears.” As for Josie, Tatiana reflected, “I don’t know who, really, she thinks I am, and whether she will feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother.”

Now it will be up to Caroline, the former ambassador to Japan and Australia, to help fill in the blanks, just as her mother, Jackie, had done after JFK’s assassination. “Caroline has to do the same thing her mother did with her and John, in raising those kids,” says a family friend. “To make sure they remember their mom — and she has the playbook.” Says Gillon, “Tatiana’s son is the same age that John was when he lost his dad. Tragically, history is repeating itself.” As Maria Shriver simply said of Caroline: “What a rock she has been.”

There was much more to Tatiana than her celebrated lineage. Raised in Manhattan, she and her siblings attended private schools and were kept largely out of the spotlight by their parents — a stark contrast to the trail of paparazzi that followed Caroline and John for years. “Caroline is a doting mom who did her best to let her kids have a normal childhood,” says a friend. After graduating from Yale — where Tatiana studied history, edited the school newpaper and met her husband George — she earned a Masters from Oxford and became a rookie reporter for The Record newspaper in New Jersey. “She was very quiet, very shy,” says colleague Stephanie Akin, who recalls a police chief asking Tatiana if it was true that she was a Kennedy during her early weeks on the job. “She was upset that everybody knew who she was before she even walked into a room and started crying in the middle of the newsroom.”

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In 2014 she joined The New York Times and became a climate reporter, covering everything from the annual Polar Bear Club plunge off Coney Island to humpback whales dying in the Atlantic Ocean. The work “turned me, a lifelong New Yorker, into an outdoorsy person,” she wrote in a 2023 Outside Magazine piece about the Birkebeiner, a 50-kilometer cross country ski race in Wisconsin that took her seven and a half hours to complete, putting her in 3,839th place out of 3,855. “She was a superstar,” says a longtime friend. “As a writer, she could capture a moment. She had a great sense of humor and was wickedly smart. She had it all.”

Speaking with PEOPLE in 2019 about her book, Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have, she credited “summers at my grandmother’s house in Martha’s Vineyard…which made us all feel that nature was really important.” And she praised her husband as “incredibly encouraging” of her writing: “He’ll tell me how important he thinks what I’m doing is, and I feel like, well, you’re a doctor, nothing really compares to that…We’re doing our part — and George can take care of saving peoples’ lives.”

Six years later, as her life was ending, she wrote “the most honest essay imaginable,” says New Yorker editor David Remnick. “Her clear-eyed view of her illness and the time she had left, her boundless love for her family, her regret that her children might not remember her, her frank anger about her close relative, RFK Jr. — all of it is so passionately written.” Indeed, she took her cousin, President Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services, to task for research cuts that could help cancer patients, describing him as “an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family.”

Before her diagnosis, she planned to write a second book, focusing on the climate crisis and the world’s oceans — long a place of solace for the Kennedy family. Instead, her remaining time was dedicated to her children — Eddie, who wore a head scarf to match hers when visiting the hospital, and red-haired Josie, who wore bright yellow rain boots and a string of fake pearls around the house — “to try and fill my brain with memories,” wrote Tatiana. “Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I’ll remember this forever…”