Maria Shriver supports ‘extraordinary’ cousin Tatiana Schlossberg amid terminal cancer battle
NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK: After JFK’s granddaughter Tatiana Schlossberg recently revealed her diagnosis of terminal cancer, journalist and former first lady of California Maria Shriver offered heartfelt support for her cousin through a social media post, describing her as extraordinary.
The post underscores both the uncertainty of life and the strength of familial bonds.
Maria Shriver's post for her cousin
Shriver, on Saturday, November 22, took to Instagram to share Schlossberg’s essay for the New Yorker, in which Schlossberg revealed she has a year to live after giving birth to her second child last year.
“If you can only read one thing today, please make take the time for this extraordinary piece of writing by my cousin [Caroline Kennedy’s] extraordinary daughter Tatiana,” she wrote.
“Tatiana is a beautiful writer, journalist, wife, mother, daughter, sister, and friend,” Shriver added. “This piece is about what she has been going through for the last year and a half. It’s an ode to all the doctors and nurses who toil on the frontlines of humanity. It’s so many things, but best to read it yourself, and be blown away by one woman’s life story.”
She then urged readers “to be grateful for the life [they] are living today, right now, this very minute.”
Tatiana Schlossberg details cancer diagnosis after childbirth
Schlossberg’s heartbreaking essay mentioned how doctors noticed her “blood count looked strange” after she welcomed her daughter.
“A normal white-blood-cell count is around four to eleven thousand cells per microliter,” she stated. “Mine was a hundred and thirty-one thousand cells per microliter.” She recalled the doctor saying the blood test result could either be related to her pregnancy, “or it could be leukemia.”
“I did not, could not, believe that they were talking about me,” Schlossberg wrote. “I had swum a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew.”
She mentioned that medical professionals recommended a bone-marrow transplant and chemotherapy, but after months of treatment, her condition had worsened.
Tatiana Schlossberg credits family’s support during cancer treatment
Schlossberg highlighted that her first thought was for her newborn daughter and 3-year-old son.
She shared that her husband, George Moran, had done “everything” that “he possibly could,” communicating with doctors and sleeping on hospital room floors to be with her.
She also credited her parents, Kennedy and Edwin, as well as her sister Rose and brother Jack, who stepped in to raise her two children for the past year and a half while she received treatment.
