She was 35.

She was a mom to two young children. She was married to a urologist. She was an environmental journalist who wrote for The New York Times and wrote for the New Yorker about the terminal cancer diagnosis that stole her life. She was a member of America’s most storied political family, an heir to President John F. Kennedy.

The John F. Kennedy Library Foundation announced the death of Tatiana Schlossberg – the middle child of Caroline Kennedy – on Dec. 30. The cause was acute myeloid leukemia, a rare cancer of the blood and bone marrow.

The tragic circumstances of her death didn’t stop her from becoming tabloid fodder.

The New York Post published photos of her brother Jack Schlossberg, the offbeat leftist influencer and New York congressional candidate, hours after her death was made public. He was pushing her son in a stroller. The outlet parroted the “Kennedy curse” conspiracy when her diagnosis was made public.

Schlossberg wrote in her viral New Yorker essay, “A Battle with My Blood,” that doctors had discovered her cancer after she delivered her daughter in 2024. The cancer worsened. Her parents and brother and sister helped her husband raise their kids, she said. They sat in hospital rooms. They helped take care of her son and daughter in ways she couldn’t.

Schlossberg’s mother, of course, lost her 46-year-old father to a public assassination when she was 5. Caroline Kennedy, 68, has now lost her 35-year-old daughter. “For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry,” Schlossberg wrote.

“Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it,” she added. Maria Shriver, her mom’s cousin, returned to social media to pay tribute, two weeks after the deaths of her friends and Hollywood heavyweights Rob and Michele Singer Reiner.

“She loved her life, and she fought like hell to try to save it,” Shriver, daughter of JFK’s sister, the late Eunice Kennedy Shriver, wrote of Schlossberg. “I cannot make sense of this. I cannot make any sense of it at all.”

Schlossberg planned to write a book about oceans. She loved her husband and her mother and her young children. She loved her life.

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Oceans are vast and free and unknown. Schlossberg will no longer be able to study them. It is hard to understand oceans or climate change (another of her journalistic pursuits) or a devastating diagnosis or how a family tragedy becomes tabloid fodder. It is hard to understand time.

“Being in the present is harder than it sounds, so I let the memories come and go,” Schlossberg wrote in her New Yorker essay’s closing lines. “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.”

Our lives can’t be reduced to clickbait or headlines or conspiracy theories.

Her life was a whole story.