31st December 2025 – (New York) Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of former U.S. President John F Kennedy and a respected climate journalist, has died at the age of 35. Her death was confirmed by her family in a statement shared via the John F Kennedy Library Foundation on social media, which read: “Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts.”
Schlossberg, the daughter of designer Edwin Schlossberg and U.S. ambassador Caroline Kennedy, was widely recognised for her incisive reporting on climate and environmental issues. She built a distinguished career as a journalist, writing for outlets including the New York Times and authoring the book Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have, which examined how everyday choices contribute to the climate crisis in unseen ways.
In her work, Schlossberg argued that climate change underpins almost every aspect of modern life. Speaking to NBC News in 2019, she described it as “the biggest story in the world”, explaining that it encompassed “science and nature, but… also politics and health and business”. She said she hoped that by communicating clearly on the subject, she might inspire others to engage with and act on the issue.
Her reporting included coverage of local and innovative responses to global warming. In December 2021, for example, she wrote about efforts in London to capture residual heat from the Underground network and redirect it into homes, providing low‑carbon warmth as part of the city’s wider climate strategy.
Schlossberg’s illness became public in November when she revealed she had been diagnosed with an aggressive cancer and had been told she was unlikely to have long to live.
In a deeply personal essay for The New Yorker last month, titled “A Battle With My Blood”, she disclosed that she had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia in May 2024, shortly after the birth of her second child.
“My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me,” she wrote.
She detailed the course of treatment she underwent, including chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant, while making clear that doctors had not been optimistic about her prospects. Alongside the physical toll of the disease, she described the emotional weight of confronting her mortality and the grief she feared her death would cause her family.
Reflecting on the Kennedy family’s history of loss – her grandfather, President John F Kennedy, was assassinated in 1963, and her uncle, John F Kennedy Jr, died in a plane crash in 1999 – Schlossberg wrote of the anguish of adding to that legacy of tragedy.
“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 reflected. “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.”
Her younger brother, Jack Schlossberg, is currently standing for Congress in New York, continuing the family’s long association with public life.
In the same essay, Schlossberg also expressed dismay at the appointment of her uncle, Robert F Kennedy Jr, to head the Department of Health and Human Services, signalling her unease with some of his high‑profile positions.