Loss always plays mean arithmetic, and Carole Radziwill is familiar with the formula. Razdiw was dragged back into the emotional landscape she had spent decades ago when she had tended to her husband, Anthony Radziwill, who was dying of terminal cancer. When the news came that Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy, had passed away at age 35 of acute myeloid leukemia, Radziwill flashed back to that emotional landscape she had been in many years previously. “The arithmetic of loss never makes sense to me who stays, who goes, and when. Some people are spared and others are not, and there is no moral logic to it. That is the part I still can’t accept”, and this is what I wrote in a touching Instagram homage, she wrote.
The disease that Schlossberg had was aggressive and rare at the same time. She revealed in a New Yorker essay published in November 2025 that physicians had diagnosed her cancer soon after the birth of her second child, Josephine. A case of an abnormal count of white blood cells, 131,000 cells per microliter rather than the usual 4,000 to 11,000, soon developed into a case of acute myeloid leukemia with a rare mutation known as Inversion 3. She had stem cell transplants, one of them being her own sister Rose, and was enrolled in clinical trials but still admitted that her prognosis was terminal. “I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew”, she wrote, reminiscing of the time she spent swimming a mile in the pool a few days prior to her diagnosis.
Her articles spoke to Radziwill who was in her five-year marriage to Anthony struggling to meet the incessant needs of nurturing. The fight against cancer lasted throughout the full relationship of Anthony and he passed away six days after his 40 th birthday in 1999. The emotional aspect of having a terminally ill husband, which Radziwill has addressed in her memoir, What Remains, as well as on The Real Housewives of New York City is something that many people are too embarrassed to talk about. Emotions of anger, guilt, and even relief are normal reactions to the strain as described by psychological researches on caregiving but caregivers tend to criticize themselves on how they reacted.
The mother of Anthony and Radziwill has given an account of how they both became grieving “allies” hanging to each other after his death, not knowing how to find their way in the world without him. The bond was created during the silent, tiresome intervals of concern: nights in the hospital, making medical decisions and the balancing act between hope and reality that always takes place. This dynamic was reflected in the own narration of Schlossberg, who described how her own family stood by her hand as long as she has been victimized and did not want to demonstrate its grief and sorrow because it would hurt me.
To Schlossberg the heartbreak went beyond her own mortality. She described how she was scared that her children would not know her, that the memories of her son would fade into photos and narratives, and her daughter would never get to know her well as “mother”. She complimented her husband, George Moran, on doing everything he could do to me, terming him as perfect and regretting about their life together that they could not continue living.
The Kennedy family history has been identified with a record of serving the people and constant personal tragedy in family members, such as the childhood trauma of the Kennedy family; Caroline Kennedy had lost her father to an assassination attempt, and just weeks before Anthony died, John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife Carolyn were killed in an airplane crash. The death of Schlossberg is another step in a family that is marked with tragedy, but is a family that is characterized by resilience as well.
Radziwill urged people touched by the story of Schlossberg to contribute to the Kennedy Library in her memory; she added that she had not been asked to donate, but it was a nice gesture that she wanted to do and she was certain that the family would be grateful. By doing this she provided a means by which others could sublimate grief into remembering and this is an act that is representative of the long-standing human desire to make meaning in the presence of loss.
The experience of Schlossberg, which he publicly disclosed to the world, highlights the importance of honesty about people living with terminal illness to enlighten and help others understand and sympathize with them. Her cogitations about memory, presence, and love make readers think about how even the most problematic moments of life can be beautiful. And to Radziwill, when he recalls Tatania and Anthony, he is also reminding him that grief can never adjust to logic but the relationships that have been established in love and care can never be separated by time.
