Tatiana Schlossberg's Death Is the 'Hardest of All' for Caroline Kennedy as She Lives With 'Horrible Burden' of Kennedy Curse

Caroline Kennedy has coped with grief surrounding the ‘Kennedy Curse,’ for decades — but the recent death of her daughter, Tatiana Schlossberg, has reportedly struck a nerve.

Presidential historian Steven M. Gillon informed an outlet that despite the 68-year-old’s history of loss, she is really struggling.

"Her mom [Jackie Kennedy] dies at 64, a relatively young age. Then, in 1999, she loses her brother, and it's just a series of horrible personal tragedies that leads up to the death now of her daughter," said Steven. “[Tatiana's death] may be the hardest of them all."

The expert added, “Whenever a Kennedy dies, and certainly when they die in a tragic way, it just brings to mind all the others. You can't look at it in isolation. It just reminds you of this horrible burden that this family has had to bear.”

Steven pointed out how Caroline’s means of dealing with family deaths remains a mystery.

"We can document the different tragedies in her life, but what we don't know is how she dealt with those things," he said. "She never talked about them, at least not publicly. We can only surmise based on the family tradition that she's dealing with death the way Kennedys always deal with death, which is through resolve."

The Kennedy family has suffered a great deal of loss. Besides Tatiana, those included in the "Kennedy Curse" are John F. Kennedy (assassinated in 1963), Robert F. Kennedy (assassinated in 1968), John F. Kennedy Jr. (died in a 1999 plane crash), David A. Kennedy (died of a drug overdose in 1984) and Michael Kennedy (died in a 1997 skiing accident).

Tatiana passed away on Tuesday, December 30, 2025, at age 35, after suffering from acute myeloid leukemia. She was diagnosed after giving birth to her second child in May 2024 and shared insight into her condition in a November 2025 essay.

"A few hours later, my doctor noticed that my blood count looked strange,” she wrote of the moment after welcoming her baby. “A normal white-blood-cell count is around four to eleven thousand cells per microliter. Mine was a hundred and thirty-one thousand cells per microliter. It could just be something related to pregnancy and delivery, the doctor said, or it could be leukemia."

In January 2025, Tatiana was informed that she only had one year left to live. She underwent chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant, as well as took part in a clinical trial of CAR-T-cell therapy, a form of immunotherapy that fights blood cancers.

The environmental journalist credited her family for "raising [her] children and sitting in [her] 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," she expressed.

Tatiana was upset over how she "added a new tragedy" to her sister Rose's life, despite her striving to be "a good student and a good sister and a good daughter."

"There’s nothing I can do to stop it," the author admitted.

Tatiana’s family mourned her loss at her funeral on Tuesday, January 6, including her brother Jack, who looked heartbroken.

The political commentator shared a sweet tribute to his sister on Instagram by reposting one of her inspirational quotes: “It's up to us to create a country that takes seriously its obligations to the planet, to each other, and to the people who will be born into a world that looks different than ours has for the past 10,000 years or so. Essentially, what I'm describing is hard work with possibly limited success for the rest of your life. But we have to do it, and at least we will have the satisfaction of knowing we made things better. Come on, it will be fun (?)."