Jack Schlossberg reacted to his sister Tatiana’s terminal cancer diagnosis.
Taking to his Instagram Story over the weekend, Jack — the only son of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg — posted a photo of a concrete road followed by a picture of a blue sky.
“Life is short — let it rip,” the 32-year-old wrote atop both images.
Jack — who is running for Congress — also shared screenshots of excerpts from Tatiana’s New Yorker essay in which she detailed being diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia immediately after giving birth to her second baby with her husband, George Moran, in May 2024.
Tatiana, 35, recalled receiving the earth-shattering news, writing, “I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me,” describing herself as “one of the healthiest people” she knew.
Her treatment was intense, as she underwent several rounds of chemotherapy and immunotherapy as well as multiple bone marrow transplants.
“My sister [Rose Schlossberg] had turned out to be a match and would donate her stem cells. (My brother was a half-match, but he still asked every doctor if maybe a half-match was better, just in case.),” she wrote.
Tatiana, an environmental journalist, marveled that her husband, a doctor, “did everything for [her] that he possibly could.
“He talked to all the doctors and insurance people that I didn’t want to talk to; he slept on the floor of the hospital; he didn’t get mad when I was raging on steroids and yelled at him that I did not like Schweppes ginger ale, only Canada Dry. He would go home to put our kids to bed and come back to bring me dinner.”
She praised George for being “perfect.”
“I feel so cheated and so sad that I don’t get to keep living the wonderful life I had with this kind, funny, handsome genius I managed to find,” she lamented.
Tatiana also credited her parents, her younger brother and her older sister, 37, with keeping her company during her hospital stays and helping care for her 3-year-old son and 18-month-old daughter.
“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,” she explained, admitting that part of her feels guilty for adding “a new tragedy” to her mother’s life.
During her last clinical trial, Tatiana’s doctor told her he could keep her alive “for a year, maybe,” but she did not specify exactly when that was.
“My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me,” she confessed.
Tatiana concluded her heartbreaking essay, “Mostly, I try to live and be with them now. But being in the present is harder than it sounds, so I let the memories come and go. So many of them are from my childhood that I feel as if I’m watching myself and my kids grow up at the same time.
“Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I’ll remember this forever, I’ll remember this when I’m dead. Obviously, I won’t. But since I don’t know what death is like and there’s no one to tell me what comes after it, I’ll keep pretending. I will keep trying to remember.”
Like Jack, Maria Shriver also encouraged her Instagram followers to read the powerful words written by her “extraordinary” cousin.
Tatiana’s maternal grandparents are former President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963, and former first lady Jacqueline “Jackie” Kennedy Onassis, who died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 1994.
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