A Word In Edgewise: Will My Children Remember Me?

In answer to a recent “Personal History” piece published on November 22, one respondent griped that it never would have been published but for the writer’s “Kennedy” name. Perhaps not, but in my opinion, that was part of the point of the essay.

Tatiana Celia Kennedy Schlossberg chose November 22 to reveal a personal tragedy to evoke the shock and mourning that travelled the globe on that date in 1963 when her grandfather, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

Tatiana is the daughter of Caroline Kennedy, televised worldwide as a 5-year-old standing by her widowed mother, First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, as her little brother, John Jr., saluted — on his third birthday — their father’s horse-drawn hearse.

In 2024, Tatiana, 34, an athletic, outgoing young woman, a widely-travelled environmental journalist and author, had just delivered her second child, a daughter. A follow-up blood draw revealed an alarmingly high white blood cell count and a diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia, with a “rare inversion mutation 3,” making the standard disease presentation highly resistant to treatment and prone to relapse and reappearance.

Tatiana’s personal account is harrowing. But her aim is not to seek pity or financial assistance, but rather to stress that even a Kennedy name and finances do not exempt one from a shattering, fatal disease. Despite access to excellent care, from superb nursing to a team of medical specialists (including her physician husband, George), her prognosis is bleak.

She makes clear the amount of funding and research that have gone into finding the treatments and/or prevention for earlier diseases, that have killed scores over the years, and how critical it is to keep on funding the research and experimentation, so that the “rare inversion mutation 3,” as well as other fatal illnesses, may be overcome.

That time is yet to come. Tatania frankly addresses the role her cousin, Robert Francis Kennedy Jr., is playing in the obstruction of current preventative techniques, the hindrance of vital research, and the damage he has done in the medical field and to the family name. Will efforts for her own treatments be discontinued?

The Kennedy family itself illustrates the importance of time and research in saving lives. Baby Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, born August 7, 1963, lived only 39 hours before succumbing to Hyaline membrane disease (HMD, now infantile respiratory distress syndrome), a lung surfactant deficiency disorder prevalent in premature infants. The nation mourning that tiny Kennedy’s death brought attention to the disease and increased research to bear, to a degree that today some 90% of affected infants survive.

The toddler JFK nearly died in 1920 from scarlet fever. There’s still no vaccine, but once antibiotics were developed for soldiers in WWII and flowed on to civilians, the deadly streptococcus bacteria could be controlled. While president, Kennedy also suffered from Addison’s disease, an autoimmune deficiency of the adrenal glands. This, too, with the later development of hormone replacement therapy, became treatable. Whooping cough, measles, chicken pox and many others were all dangerous in their day — and can become so again without proper vigilance, together with the protection of a high percentage of the populace, together with ongoing research into emerging threats.

We’ve become complacent. Because earlier diseases aren’t seen as often doesn’t mean they’re gone. Perhaps we were lulled by the recent eradication of smallpox, achievable since — nearly uniquely — it had no vectors, no secondary carriers. We must remember that mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, mites, tsetse flies and aquatic snails still go about their business, covering even larger areas as the atmosphere warms. While we may no longer remember them, mumps, measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, scarlet fever and others lie waiting in the wings.

If Tatiana’s physician is correct in his estimate of her having “maybe another year,” her daughter will be about little John Jr.’s age when he saluted his father’s coffin. Beyond the personal burden of disease is the fearful question of similarly afflicted young mothers: “Will my children remember me?”

Tatiana Schlossberg died of acute myeoloid leukemia at the age of 35 on December 30, 2025.