Caroline Kennedy — the daughter of late President John F. Kennedy — and her husband Ed Schlossberg have moved in with their son-in-law to help raise their grandchildren after the death of their daughter, Tatiana Schlossberg.
Tatiana died in December at age 35 after she was diagnosed with blood cancer, leaving behind her husband, urologist Dr. George Moran, and two young children: four-year-old Edwin and two-year-old Josephine.
“My parents are grandparents, but they're really playing the role of new parents right now,” Tatiana’s younger brother Jack Schlossberg, 33, told People in an interview published Thursday.
“They live with my niece and nephew and take care of them every single day. They're really taking everything in stride, but really taking care of the kids.”
He added, “Most people don’t realize that they are really acting as new parents right now, and they're all living in the same apartment.”
Tatiana, an environmental journalist, shared a devastatingly poignant essay in The New Yorker last year in which, upon receiving her fatal diagnosis shortly after the birth of her daughter, she considered how her children will remember her.
“During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe. My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me,” she wrote.
“My son might have a few memories, but he’ll probably start confusing them with pictures he sees or stories he hears. I didn’t ever really get to take care of my daughter — I couldn’t change her diaper or give her a bath or feed her, all because of the risk of infection after my transplants,” she wrote.
She added, “I was gone for almost half of her first year of life. I don’t know who, really, she thinks I am, and whether she will feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother.”
Tatiana died December 30, weeks after the essay was published. The JFK Library Foundation wrote in a statement: “Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts.”
After her death, Tatiana’s family has largely been private in their grief. Last month, Jack opened up in an interview with Vanity Fair and said that he has not had time to “process” the loss.
“So I miss her all the time,” he told the outlet. “Every day I think about her. But it also really does motivate me to do everything I can with every waking moment I have, because I realize it could have just as easily been me, and I have an obligation to her, not just to myself, to make the most out of my precious life and all that I’ve been given in this life to give back to others and make sure that we can fund cures for the type of cancer that took her life, and for other types of cancer.”
Earlier this month, Caroline paid tribute to Tatiana for the first time in a speech at the annual John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award ceremony, held at her late father’s presidential library in Boston.
After welcoming her family members and newcomers to the event, Caroline’s voice wavered as she said, “Most of all, we remember Tatiana, who served on the board of this library, and represented everything my parents stood for in her beautiful, amazing and too-short life.”
