Tatiana Schlossberg (1990-2025)

In May of 1990, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and her husband, Edwin Schlossberg, gathered with family and friends at St. Thomas More Catholic Church in New York for the christening of Tatiana Celia Kennedy Schlossberg, their second child. We learned that day that the baby’s first name was homage to a Russian-born artist, Tatyana Grossman, whom her parents admired.

Four years later, in May of 1994, at the funeral mass for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Caroline read the poem “Memory of Cape Cod,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, which she told the mourners her mother kept on a special bookshelf in her room:

They said: Come along! They said: Leave your pebbles on the sand and come along, it’s long after sunset!

Later in the mass, memorialized in a privately-printed book, Caroline returned to the pulpit and read Psalm 121:

The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand,

The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.

Alas, in her 68 years, the Lord has not always been Caroline Kennedy’s keeper and shade. The sun and the moon have smitten her far more than she or anyone deserves. She lost her father at 5, and her mother and brother while still fairly young, not to mention close cousins on both sides of her family. Now this, the loss of a child, the deepest pain any person can feel.

Unlike Job, who argued with God over his unjust afflictions, Caroline has borne hers with a grace and humor beyond imagining, as I’ve seen over the years. She and Ed are already helping Tatiana’s husband, George Moran, raise their two grandchildren. Their fortitude is epic.

I never knew Tatiana well. We talked occasionally about journalism, which ran a bit in the family. Her grandfather covered the founding of the United Nations in 1945 for the Hearst newspaper chain before going into politics. I befriended her mother nearly 50 years ago when we both wrote for the Harvard Crimson.

I knew that Tatiana had written a useful book on how to do more for the environment than just wringing your hands. But I didn’t see her full talent until her recent New Yorker essay, an exquisite piece of writing that will be read for generations for its spare and unflinching depiction of terminal illness. One of the saddest sections was this:

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. This has been a great gift, even though I feel their pain every day. 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. 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.

I especially appreciated the essay because I know first-hand how hard it is to write about something so personal. My 2007 Newsweek story about my cancer experience is the most-read article I’ve ever written, but it wasn’t as well-rendered as Tatiana’s. It also wasn’t as tough to write because I was, by then, cancer-free.

Tatiana had leukemia; I had a blood cancer cousin, lymphoma. We both went through stem cell transplants. Hers failed; mine worked, and I’ve been in good health for the 21 years since. This has left me with a touch of survivor’s guilt. I’ve been lucky enough to see my children grow up. She was diagnosed just after giving birth to her second child, Josephine, and never even held her for fear of infection. “Life is unfair,” as her grandfather famously said in 1962.

After her article appeared, I wrote Tatiana to say that her Proustian reference to her chemo smelling like “canned tomato soup” took me back to my transplant: “It really did smell like that! But I didn’t have the wit to write about it, much less include the perfect ‘canned.’” A month ago, Tatiana wrote me back, thanking me for “validating my sense of smell.”

When Tatiana was nine years old, her great uncle Ted eulogized his nephew, JFK Jr., after he died in an airplane crash: “We dared to think, in that Irish phrase, that this John Kennedy would live to comb gray hair.”

Like too many others in her family, Tatiana Schlossberg won’t live to comb it, either. But hers was a life well-lived. May her memory be a blessing.

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