JFK Jr’s Granddaughter Has A Year To Live, Here’s What She Wants You To Know

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Hey, there, folks. It is Sunday, November twenty third, and we are hopping on because we have a reading assignment for you. Whatever you do, take the time, certainly, if you can't do it today, do it in the next couple of days and read the New Yorker essay by Tatiana Schlasberg. She is the granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy Junior, and in that essay she let us know that she has been given less than a year to live. And with that, welcome to this episode of amy and TJ ropes. The headlines in a lot of places said that the granddaughter of JFK has terminal illness, and that's true, but so many of the articles nothing tells this story better than she tells it in her own words.

00:00:50
Speaker 2: I was so moved by her vulnerability, by the way she described how she is living, what she's been through. And my god, when you read how and when it happened, she was thirty four years old in the hospital giving birth to her daughter, and her whole world turned upside down. And I think you know, in terms of the timing of this article, we are now everyone's gearing up for family and food and yes, it's fun, but it's stressful, and people get to complaining about I gotta do this, and Aunt Deborah said that, And this article puts your life and why we're here into total perspective.

00:01:32
Speaker 1: I mean, I would dare anybody to read this article and not have a better day than you plan. And what I mean by that is you cannot go through your day and not be more appreciative of your health, your friends, your family, your surroundings. You have to be more appreciative after reading something like this, and you talk about holidays, everybody's getting ramped up for this family's getting ready to spend what might possibly be the last set of holidays with Tatiana Schlosberg. We don't hear necessarily, we think Kennedy Kennedy client does. You could start naming off Kennedy family members, but Schlosberg has been in the headlines here lately because her brother just announced he's running for Congress, And what did everybody say? That Camelot is back? Right? Everybody's so these are our royals.

00:02:21
Speaker 2: I was just gonna say, the Kennedy family, I can't think. Maybe there's a Bush dynasty, but it doesn't even compare to the Kennedy dynasty in this country, for sure. They are our version of the UK's royal family.

00:02:36
Speaker 1: So I think everything that had I think it always starts with JFK. Right, these these tentacles, and who he's This is his granddaughter, his niece, and we use that all the time. But this is the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and her husband Edwin Schlosburg. Their daughter, the granddaughter of JFK.

00:02:56
Speaker 3: And robe.

00:02:56
Speaker 1: She has revealed, as we said, the name of this article line courage everybody. I beg you to read it. It's called a Battle with My Blood and this is where she explains that she has a terminal cancer diagnosis and the doctor has given her one year to live. Now it's about a It's a longer article, sure, and it's worth every second that you read. But we want to share some stuff from that article, and I think this. There was so much in there to do robes, but this was at least one quote or section I plucked out that almost summed up the whole thing the best you can, and least in terms of what she's going through.

00:03:30
Speaker 2: She says, 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. My son might have a few memories, but he'll probably start confusing them with the 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.

00:03:59
Speaker 3: The risk infection.

00:04:00
Speaker 2: After my transplants, 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.

00:04:13
Speaker 1: And folks, what we're talking about. The son is three, I have it right. Son is three, the daughter is one, and the daughter was born on the same day that Tatiana Schlosberg found out that she had leukemia, that she had this form of cancer robes and that the story here is pretty remarkable. But she goes into the hospital last year, last summer to have a baby. She has the baby, and they notice something about her blood cell count. They say it was off. Now I don't understand all these numbers, but I understand at least the difference in numbers, they have something this micro leader count. This is something you're familiar with, yes, at least Okay, so there, it was supposed to be between four to eleven thousand cells per micro leader. Hers was one hundred and one thousand and thirty one thousand, So obviously that's a discrepancy sometimes, so that's some kind So they start looking at it. Why was this If you have any I'm sorry, I'm put you in a doctor hat here, but I wasn't as familiar with what that means.

00:05:07
Speaker 2: No. So basically, when they saw these elevated white blood cells, that can be a sign of an infection or leukemia, but it also could have been something to do with her body. She literally had just given birth.

00:05:20
Speaker 1: They told her right that this might be just associated with you just had a baby.

00:05:23
Speaker 3: They actually told her, don't worry.

00:05:25
Speaker 2: It's either you know, this is just something that happens to your body after you give birth, or it could be leukemia, and we think it's probably something about you having just given birth. Her husband at the time was a med student, so he starts reaching out to everyone they know, and they all kind of in the hours they were waiting, they all were telling her don't worry. It's almost likely just because you gave birth. Now, I was imagining this. Any woman who's given birth to her child, you want to have that cocoon, that moment you're holding your baby. Her mother and her father were coming in with their three year old and she had to be immediately wheeled away to undergo hours of tests while they all waited for the results, which was the worst case scenario, something she couldn't have possibly prepared herself for.

00:06:15
Speaker 1: Well, no, how could you ever prepare yourself right for this kind of diagnosis. But we go farther than that, robes in that this was something so wildly rare. Right, if you get a cancer diagnosis at any age would be difficult, but this was such a rare thing, and for somebody her age, it was even more rare. This is one of the healthiest thirty five, thirty four year old women you will ever find, and for this to happen to her again a rare mutation. She has a cute myloid leukemia, and this rare mutation is called iverson three in version three. Excuse me, I said, iris, And I'm a sports fan. No, she's not a Philadelphia fan, Okay, the inversion three so rare. The doctors are asking her if she was a great zero for nine eleven.

00:07:01
Speaker 2: Because blood cancers have obviously and terminal blood cancers have been prevalent among folks who were there. She told them this. This was such a shocking response given how young she was. She said, I was in sixth grade when nine to eleven happened. Yes, I was in New York City, but I was nowhere near the site. And this was It's been found in those types of emergency workers, but also in much much older people, So it was it's bizarre. They don't have an explanation. They don't know why. She was explaining that the day before she gave birth, at nine months pregnant, she swam a mile.

00:07:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, people can't do that.

00:07:36
Speaker 2: The day before, she said, almost every weekend she went to Central Park and ran anywhere between five.

00:07:41
Speaker 3: And ten miles.

00:07:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a healthy lady. I'm a physically active lady. This is just what happens. Unfortunately, and some time. So this set off a whole chain of events in her life where this was supposed to be mediate bonding time, expanding your family, and she finds out on that day that her life is about to change. Change is one thing. But there was a fight that ensued immediately on the day of her child's birth for her to stay alive. That immediately same day, her life became something else. So this started robes whole rounds of chemo therapy, trials for drugs, getting a bone marrow transplant, remission and relapse several times. She has been going through hell for a year.

00:08:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, she's had two bone marrow transplants, one from her sister and one from a complete stranger who she says she wishes she could think. She knows he's from the Pacific Northwest, and that's it. And they worked for a little bit of time and then she immediately relapsed.

00:08:42
Speaker 3: But just what it takes.

00:08:43
Speaker 2: Look, we have an experience with our former colleague, Robin Roberts. When you go through a bone marrow transplant. One of my good friend's mothers did this too. They nearly kill you with chemo to get your immune You have no immune system, you're a baby. You have to be revaccinated after each one. That is how much they what they put your body through. So she did that twice, all within the span of what it's been a year and a half, just what she has been living through privately for the last year and a half, what that family has been through when they thought they were going to be celebrating the baby's first steps, and she was probably looking forward to changing diapers.

00:09:21
Speaker 3: That was just such a reminder of what.

00:09:24
Speaker 2: You think is going to happen, and in one moment, your whole world can turn upside down.

00:09:29
Speaker 1: I didn't think about it too, You just said it the idea. I mean, how many times, how many people? How many times you rolled your eyes at some point because one of your kids blew up the diaper again?

00:09:38
Speaker 2: Right?

00:09:39
Speaker 1: Damn, I just changed right. Every parent out there has had that moment. We get in, we understand why. And to hear that a woman is desperate to change her child's diaper and she cannot. She's too weak to even pick up her child. At this point, she says she had to learn to walk again when she went home. She is just preparing for the end at a time when and she makes this, I would have had the same first thought. Will my daughter even know? I was hew, Mama. She doesn't know it now, she's too young to kind of understand it. But the woman she's seeing now she's not having playdates with and not having those warm and fun moments to take pictures. And here's video for like it's tough, and you see the images of her now versus just a year ago. Jesus Christ.

00:10:27
Speaker 2: I was looking at her pictures from her happy marriage in twenty seventeen. It's just remarkable what can happen in a period of time. And I know as a mom, look, this is nothing. But when you get a diagnosis, the first thing you think about are your kids. How can I take care of them? Will they remember me? Will I be there for them when they need me? That is what every mom would think immediately.

00:10:49
Speaker 1: So the baby is a year old now and the holidays are coming up. You talked about what she's going through robes, and I think many people will immediately think also about what the family has gone through. The Kennedy family. Like anybody listening right now can probably reel off at least five tragedies you know about that the Kennedy family has been through. Is they call it the Kennedy curse. Look, that's a colloquial way that people try to sum up and try to explain all the tragedies we've seen with this family, but so many of them rongs we have to in this is what every family goes through. Somebody's sick, somebody dies in an accident, somebody goes jail, somebody makes a mistake. All these things is just such a big clan. They are everywhere, I mean, the Kennedy's and the names, and so we look at it, and even the family has said over the years, there's no Kennedy curse. Are families just like every other family. We're just living out these tragedies in public in the most high profile of ways. But romes. When we go through here now and go back to some of these things that's happened to this family, it's hard to feel, like Jesus, this family is just cursed.

00:11:59
Speaker 2: Frankly, yes, So you actually put together a list and it is in. Some of them I knew, and some of them I had forgotten about, and some of them I had never heard of.

00:12:08
Speaker 1: That's true. It goes back all the way to nineteen forty four. Joseph Kennedy Junior, the brother of JFK, died in a plane crash during World War Two. This was nineteen forty forty. Next years, in nineteen forty four, he was twenty nine years old, so he was the one they say that the dad really wanted to push into a political career.

00:12:29
Speaker 2: I remember this story, I remember seeing, but I had forgotten about it completely. And then Kathleen Kennedy, that's the sister of JFK. She also died in a plane crash four years later in nineteen forty eight.

00:12:44
Speaker 3: She was only twenty eight that.

00:12:46
Speaker 1: One when she was going to Paris to the French Riviera. I believe plane crash in ninety four, So keep going. Now, Patrick Kennedy, I did not roams a my crazy I did I not know this story. I remembered Jackie kin I remember the talk about miscarriage. But Patrick Kennedy was the newborn son of JFK. And Jackie Kennedy died thirty nine hours after birth, born premature, die thirty nine hours after birth in nineteen sixty three. So we there are so many That is one of the most devastating things that can happen to a family.

00:13:20
Speaker 3: And it happened to this same year that John F.

00:13:24
Speaker 2: Kennedy Junior was assassinated November twenty second, nineteen sixty three. So can you imagine Jackie O now is dealing with the loss of a child in infant I'm sure she held in her arms and probably watched die and was grieving that. And now her husband is assassinated in this same year at the age of forty six. Then, of course Robert F. Kennedy, the brother of JFK, is assassinated five years later during a speech in nineteen sixty eight. He was only forty two years old. And then of course we have the Ted Kennedy, brother of JFK.

00:14:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, everybody knows that story. They talk about the curse, but that story, I mean that dogged him the rest of his life. Yes, nuts, And yes, the young lady. How old was she when she died?

00:14:12
Speaker 3: She was twenty eight twenties, Yeah, I knew it was young.

00:14:13
Speaker 1: Had a twenty eight year old woman. Everybody knows the story. He drove it off a bridge, shap equitic, didn't call and reported for another ten hours, but she got trapped in there and died. But that was something that again dogged him in that family for quite a while.

00:14:26
Speaker 2: Then you have David Kennedy, who's the son of Robert and Ethel. He died of an overdose in nineteen eighty four at the age of twenty eight.

00:14:33
Speaker 1: Some of these ages really throw me.

00:14:34
Speaker 2: Yes, so young, Michael Kennedy, I really I remembered this. One son of Robert and Ethel as Well, died in a skiing accident in Aspen on New Year's Even nineteen ninety seven. He was just thirty nine. So there you have Robert and Ethel losing two sons too young, so so tragic. And then of course we all remember jfkjun You're in Carolyn bes At Kennedy, along with her sister, all dying in that plane crash in nineteen ninety nine. They were heading to a family wedding, thirty eight years.

00:15:03
Speaker 1: Old, these ages, and he was as camelot as they get. I mean, he's just immortalized that picture, that stunning image of him, handsome as they get. Right, that was Mary Kennedy. This is one you reminded me of. I did not remember. She was the estranged wife of RFK. Junior. Died by suicide in twenty twelve at the age of fifty two. And again this is another tragedy part of that family you recalled.

00:15:29
Speaker 2: He found her, found her hanging in the barn like it was really dramatic and traumatic and made a lot of headlines. And then Sirsha Kennedy Hill, I remember a granddaughter of Robert and Ethel Again that family specifically had a lot of just unbelievable tragedies. She died by an accidental overdose in August of twenty nineteen. She was only twenty two. And then I remember this story, Mav Kennedy Townsend McCain, and she's the granddaughter of RFK. She went into a canoe with her eight year old son. They went missing.

00:16:01
Speaker 3: Their bodies were found a few days later. She was just forty. Again, her son was only eight.

00:16:06
Speaker 1: When you hear about these things and a Kennedy pay, you know, it's wild how how infrequent we seem to hear about a Kennedy dying of old age. Obviously it happens, and not every one of those makes necessarily headlines. But some of these A canoeing accident, overdose, suicide, skiing plane, right, all these what in the world. So you can't help but think, what is going on? So now we hear about something happening to another member of the Kennedy clan with cancer.

00:16:37
Speaker 3: That is rarest of cancer. That's what I mean. At the youngest of an age and.

00:16:41
Speaker 1: The healthiest of people, and the most inopportune of times. Is never a good time to get that diagnosis.

00:16:48
Speaker 3: But on the day you give birth, that's horrific.

00:16:51
Speaker 1: Okay, she wrote, And again, folks, we mentioned at the top here this beautiful, beautiful essay that we encourage you once again to read. It's in the New York It's called a Battle with My Blood. She talked a lot about what she's going through, but stay here when we come back. Want to tell you what she said in that essay, also about R. F. Kennedy Junior, her relative, of course, who is now the head of HHS. And do not miss, folks, who are going to share this with you as well her closing and most beautiful line of her essay. All right, folks, Robot and I continue now again with the story of Tassiana Schlasburg, the granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy Junior, sharing with the world over the weekend and essay in The New Yorker that she has terminal cancer. Doctors have given her a year to live with this rare, rare leukemia. Thirty five year old woman who is the mother of two kids, one three years old, the other a one year old who was born on the exact same day that she got this diagnosis. Now we talk about how beautiful essay is. She reserved some some moments for her other really famous, high profile public relative, rifk Jr. I guess it was kind of understandable, but it didn't seem that mean spirited. She could have gone a lot harder than she did.

00:18:14
Speaker 2: Absolutely, this is her cousin, and both Tatiana and her mother, Caroline. Caroline has been very outspoken, writing letters to Congress asking them to please not confirm her relative. That is, so they have been outspoken, and again not in a mean spirited way, but in a please we would like to help protect our country kind of way.

00:18:36
Speaker 1: From our family member.

00:18:37
Speaker 2: Correct. So she writes this in her essay. She said, during one of my trials, my cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Junior, was in the process of being nominated and confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Throughout my treatment, he had been on the national stage previously a Democrat. He was running for president as an independent, but mostly as an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family. I watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government. And she goes on to say that some of the drugs, specifically one of the drugs that she was being given, and certainly the vaccines that she then had to take once her body was completely stripped of any immunity, She said that those would all be in question. If what her relative wants to put in place, she might not have been able to receive the life saving care that she needed and other cancer patients, and she worries when she leaves that those other people who will come after her will not have the same access to the same drugs. And certainly the research that's been going on to try and give her new medications and longer and better way of living, they have all been stopped. They have all ground to a halt, or some of them haven't. So she worries about the future. And it's personal, it's deeply personal.

00:20:01
Speaker 1: She I thought that was that was a really good way for her to do. It did not sound bitter. She made a policy argument, I use this drug my family members ahead of a JHS. And he has now put this drug that's helped so many under review that I mean, you can't say any plan. I mean, she didn't get into a nasty argument. She makes a good, a human point, and too often we hear in Washington arguments being made for a variety of reasons. But everybody will listen to this woman, not because it's Slashburg and it's Kennedy, but because we're actually hearing from somebody who is impacted by things being done in Washington, and she just happens to have the name and the access to get her story out and make people listen. Plenty of stories out there like this, plenty that they don't get the chance to write about and tell about. So I do applaud and that's why I find it necessary to amplify this article.

00:20:56
Speaker 2: Yes, one hundred percent. She makes so many beautiful points. And I think there's also just a recognition that it doesn't matter how much money you have, It doesn't matter if your last name's Kennedy or Schlosberg or whatever. She was even talking about having holy water blessed from the Pope in her possession, and still cancer does not discriminate. And I just thought this beautiful essay she leaves behind. Hopefully can a help all of us live a little bit better and a little bit more gratefully. Coming up on this week where gratitude is at the forefront, but also just recognize how important who we elect and the ripple effects certain policies can have on so many people that you might not even know you will one day fit into the category of you might not think you'll ever be a cancer patient, but you could, and this stuff matters.

00:21:43
Speaker 1: And most people never do think they'll be a cancer patient. She closed with this line or the stood out because you and I talk about this thing all the time, trying to live in the moment, and she made an argument for why she can't right now. She closed with this, folks, she said, 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. Well done, Tatiana Slashburgh, really really really well done. That was just absolutely beautiful. And it was thought provoking, yes, and emotional.

00:22:41
Speaker 2: Yes, I'm crying for her and for her children, But I really appreciate the fact that she was willing to put this hale out there. It's not easy to be known as and remembered for being a cancer patient.

00:22:52
Speaker 3: And she even talked about with her son.

00:22:54
Speaker 2: She talks to him about what mommy does. She writes about the environment, she writes about protecting the ocean. She wants him to know him as something more than that. But this was just such a beautiful gift to the world, and I want to thank her for writing it, and folks.

00:23:07
Speaker 1: We would again, We will encourage you once again. Please take a few minutes and read it in the New Yorker. In the New Yorker, what was it? A Battle with My blood is the name of from Tatiana Schlasburg. We promise it is worth your time, and we appreciate you spending some time here with us. But we're going to hop on and speak on this it's been We've been talking about this all weekend for the most part, and been emotional about it all weekend. But I'm glad, she shared, Glad we could share with you. But for my dear Emmy Robot, I'm TJ. Holmes. Always appreciate you.