Tatiana Schlossberg, a granddaughter of John F Kennedy, has announced she has less than a year to live after being diagnosed with terminal blood cancer.
The 35-year-old environmental journalist was diagnosed with myeloid leukaemia last year after doctors noticed her "strange" white-blood-cell count after she gave birth to her daughter.
Writing about her treatment in the New Yorker magazine on the 62nd anniversary of her grandfather's assassination, Ms Schlossberg said her doctor told her he could keep her "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," she wrote.
"My son might have a few memories, but he'll probably start confusing them with 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.
"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."
Ms Schlossberg, who is the daughter of Caroline Kennedy (67), the former US ambassador to Australia and Japan, and Edwin Schlossberg (80), said she was diagnosed with myeloid leukaemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3, within hours of giving birth to her daughter on May 25, 2024.
In the past 18 months she has undergone intensive treatments, including two bone marrow transplants, chemotherapy and blood transfusions.
In January she joined a clinical trial of CAR-T-cell therapy, a type of immunotherapy against certain blood cancers, but has since been told she has less than a year to live.
Describing how she kept remembering old memories, she said: "Maybe my brain is replaying my life now because I have a terminal diagnosis, and all these memories will be lost."
Ms Schlossberg also wrote about feeling guilty for adding "a new tragedy" to her mother's life.
Less than five years after the assassination of her father, the 35th US president, in Dallas, Texas, on Nov 22, 1963, Caroline Kennedy's uncle Robert F Kennedy was also assassinated.
Her mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, died in 1994, aged 64, after she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which spread to her spinal cord, brain, and liver.
Meanwhile, her younger brother, John F Kennedy, Jr, died in 1999 at age 38 in a plane crash that also killed her sister-in-law, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, 33.
Ms Schlossberg wrote: "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. 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."
Ms Schlossberg, who married George Moran, a urologist, in 2017, also criticised her mother's cousin, Robert F Kennedy Jr, for slashing funding and fuelling vaccine scepticism as health and human services secretary.
"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," Ms Schlossberg wrote.
"Suddenly, the healthcare system on which I relied felt strained, shaky. Doctors and scientists at Columbia... didn't know if they would be able to continue their research, or even have jobs," she added.
"Bobby is a known skeptic of vaccines and I was especially concerned that I wouldn't be able to get mine again, leaving me to spend the rest of my life immunocompromised, along with millions of cancer survivors, small children, and the elderly. "