In Could of 1990, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and her husband, Edwin Schlossberg, gathered with household and pals at St. Thomas Extra Catholic Church in New York for the christening of Tatiana Celia Kennedy Schlossberg, their second little one. We realized that day that the child’s first title was homage to a Russian-born artist, Tatyana Grossman, whom her dad and mom admired.
4 years later, in Could of 1994, on the funeral mass for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Caroline learn the poem “Reminiscence of Cape Cod,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, which she informed the mourners her mom saved on a particular bookshelf in her room:
They stated: Come alongside! They stated: Go away your pebbles on the sand and are available alongside, it’s lengthy after sundown!
Later within the mass, memorialized in a privately-printed e-book, Caroline returned to the pulpit and browse Psalm 121:
The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade upon thy proper hand,
The solar shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night time.
Alas, in her 68 years, the Lord has not at all times been Caroline Kennedy’s keeper and shade. The solar and the moon have smitten her excess of she or anybody deserves. She misplaced her father at 5, and her mom and brother whereas nonetheless pretty younger, to not point out shut cousins on either side of her household. Now this, the loss of a kid, the deepest ache any particular person can really feel.
Not like Job, who argued with God over his unjust afflictions, Caroline has borne hers with a grace and humor past imagining, as I’ve seen over time. She and Ed are already serving to Tatiana’s husband, George Moran, elevate their two grandchildren. Their fortitude is epic.
I by no means knew Tatiana effectively. We talked sometimes about journalism, which ran a bit within the household. Her grandfather lined the founding of the United Nations in 1945 for the Hearst newspaper chain earlier than going into politics. I befriended her mom practically 50 years in the past after we each wrote for the Harvard Crimson.
I knew that Tatiana had written a helpful e-book on the right way to do extra for the setting than simply wringing your palms. However I didn’t see her full expertise till her current New Yorker essay, an beautiful piece of writing that shall be learn for generations for its spare and unflinching depiction of terminal sickness. One of many saddest sections was this:
My dad and mom and my brother and sister, too, have been elevating my youngsters and sitting in my varied hospital rooms virtually on daily basis for the final 12 months and a half. They’ve held my hand unflinchingly whereas I’ve suffered, making an attempt to not present their ache and unhappiness so as to defend me from it. This has been a fantastic present, despite the fact that I really feel their ache on daily basis. For my entire life, I’ve tried to be good, to be a very good scholar and a very good sister and a very good daughter, and to guard my mom and by no means make her upset or indignant. Now I’ve added a brand new tragedy to her life, to our household’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to cease it.
I particularly appreciated the essay as a result of I do know first-hand how exhausting it’s to put in writing about one thing so private. My 2007 Newsweek story about my most cancers expertise is the most-read article I’ve ever written, but it surely wasn’t as well-rendered as Tatiana’s. It additionally wasn’t as robust to put in writing as a result of I used to be, by then, cancer-free.
Tatiana had leukemia; I had a blood most cancers cousin, lymphoma. We each went by means of stem cell transplants. Hers failed; mine labored, and I’ve been in good well being for the 21 years since. This has left me with a contact of survivor’s guilt. I’ve been fortunate sufficient to see my youngsters develop up. She was recognized simply after giving start to her second little one, Josephine, and by no means even held her for concern of an infection. “Life is unfair,” as her grandfather famously stated in 1962.
After her article appeared, I wrote Tatiana to say that her Proustian reference to her chemo smelling like “canned tomato soup” took me again to my transplant: “It actually did odor like that! However I didn’t have the wit to put in writing about it, a lot much less embody the right ‘canned.’” A month in the past, Tatiana wrote me again, thanking me for “validating my sense of odor.”
When Tatiana was 9 years outdated, her nice uncle Ted eulogized his nephew, JFK Jr., after he died in an airplane crash: “We dared to suppose, in that Irish phrase, that this John Kennedy would dwell to comb grey hair.”
Like too many others in her household, Tatiana Schlossberg received’t dwell to comb it, both. However hers was a life well-lived. Could her reminiscence be a blessing.
