Approaching “A Further Shore”

You know, every so often life takes you by the scruff of the neck and gives you a good—a really good–shaking. Everything goes blotto. Numb.

Still everything hurts.

Up till then, things were going along swimmingly. Your family got fed. You weren’t sick very often. The world wasn’t yet going to hell in a handbasket.

Then. Then. Then.

Then—maybe–after the shaking–from out of the blue came a leveler. Came an impact so painful it knocked your life back into proper perspective. Two feet planted—if wobbilily—back on the ground. The ability to navigate without falling too far off the path regained.

All because of the leveler.

Happen to me?

You don’t get to be ninety without a few painful shakes by the scruff of the neck.

Most recently, maybe you know I just buried my firstborn child. That was hard.What’s harder is living life without him. Can’t call David because he’s not there. No need to think about what to get David for Christmas because he won’t be there…

Damn and rats.

But for a mercy, the above-mentioned leveler appeared by way of Caroline Kennedy’s daughter, Tatiana Schlossberg. I remember small Caroline in a blue wool coat standing tall, solemnly holding her mother’s hand…

I turned the page in The New Yorker and there was A Further Shore.

Tatiana Schlossberg is a child of what I regard as the only nobility the United States has produced.
How does a child of legends get on with her life?

A gifted writer, at Yale, Tatiana rose to be the free-wheeling Herald’s editor-in-chief. Next she gained a Master’s in American History at the University of Oxford. After a summer internship at The New York Times, she was invited to stay on, became a Metro then Science and Climate reporter.

When twenty-seven, Schlossberg left the Times and married a friend from Yale, fourth-year medical student George Moran.

Two years later, Tatiana’s first book was published: Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have. The book won first place in the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Rachel Carson Environment Book Award.

That same year, 2019, Tatiana inaugurated her twice-monthly newsletter, News from a Changing Planet. Now with over 3,000 subscribers on Substack (I’m a new one), among the fifty-three issues topics covered have been “This Week on Earth…” “How to Change a Planet…” “The Great Lakes Thaw…” “What is Government for?…” “Seeing Algae from Space…” Investigation is in extraordinary detail, the writing on intricate subjects is crystalline and inviting. It is stunning work.

In 2022, Tatiana’s son Edwin, was born. All was going happily.

May 16, 2024, Tatiana noted chattily in her newsletter she was going on maternity leave, would return by Labor Day…then she presented a long detailed impressive piece on solar geoengineering.

Nine days later, Tatiana gave birth to her second child—a healthy daughter—everything was felicitous.
But then “A few hours later, my doctor noticed that my blood count looked strange. A normal white-blood-cell count is around four thousand to eleven thousand cells per microlitre. Mine was a hundred and thirty-one thousand cells per microlitre.” At first “Everyone thought it was something to do with the pregnancy or the delivery. After a few hours, my doctors thought it was leukemia.”**

After a few more hours the doctors told Tatiana she had acute myeloid leukemia with a rare mutation called Inversion 3. Perhaps she had one year…”I had just turned thirty-four.”**

She could not believe it. The day before giving birth, she’d “swum a mile in the pool… I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew. I regularly ran five to ten miles in Central Park…”**

What followed I should spare you, but it wasn’t spared Tatiana: a postpartum hemorrhage (“almost bled to death”), month upon month of chemotherapy, two bone-marrow transplants (her sister Rose was donor for the first one), CAR-T cell therapy, a form of Epstein-Barr virus, a lung infection, cytokine-release syndrome… months and months and months in the hospital.

This passage is Tatiana in a nutshell:
“I ended up spending five weeks at Columbia-Presbyterian, and the strangeness and sadness of what I was being told about myself made me hunt for the humor in it. I didn’t know what else to do. I decided that everyone in the hospital had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and I was their target. It was a joke that I found funnier than everyone else did. Later, when I was bald and had a scrape on my face from a fall, my joke was that I was a busted-up Voldemort.**

And this:
“During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me 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….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, all because of the risk of infection after my transplants. 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.”**

Glam Jackie O’s granddaughter is beautiful on the outside—could not appear more a regal Kennedy if she’d custom ordered the parts. But lord have mercy, on the inside she is made of gold, emeralds, sapphires, rubies, asteroids, incense, myrrh–name every rare element on the planet and I believe Tatiana Celia Kennedy Schlossberg Moran is made of it.

Why do I regard her this way? Listen to her:

“My parents and my brother and sister, too, have been raising my children and sitting in my various hospital rooms almost every day for the last year and a half….This has been a great gift, even though I feel their pain every day. 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… 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.”**

I believe she is one of those people touched by God (or Fate, if you prefer)—meant to be an inspiration to those of us who aspire to be the best we can be.

No mucking about wasting the day.
No mooning around wishing we could be somewhere else doing something more this or that.
No foolish waste of time—we have so little time on this precious planet, and the way the planet is going…

More important—more germane to me—is about proportion.
Tatiana’s pain—in every form–dwarfs mine over losing my sixty-eight year-old son.
That’s a good thing.

Ach, Sylvia! Why is it a good thing, that someone else hurts more than I?

Thinking about it, I would guess that as we are each and every a part of the human condition, it’s comforting not to be suffering alone.
We are animals, after all, and need the comfort of our herd…

I began these thoughts with the notion that—if you’re fortunate—when you’re low, someone can come along and lift/push/prop you up.
Tatiana Schlossberg has, unwittingly, done that for me.

And made me realize—which I did not, till now–how much I regard us women of child-bearing years and propensities to be a sort of club…an association…we are connected one to another by the urges, needs, impulses of our bodies…our very nature…we are sisters…

By our very nature we are caregivers. And when we realize one of us needs our caring, we are impelled to rush forward, arms open wide. How I wish I could give Tatiana Schlossberg a gentle—oh so gentle—hug.

The title of her New Yorker story, by the way, Tatiana quotes from the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, “The Cure at Troy:” “Believe that a further shore / Is reachable from here. / Believe in miracles / And cures and healing wells.”

There are many on this planet who know in their bones she is going to a better place.
If there was ever any one of God’s children who merited going straight into His kingdom, I believe it is this young woman.

You there, gentle reader, please stop a moment, close your eyes, and send up a prayer for Tatiana Schlossberg.

Godspeed to this good woman.
The planet will be the poorer for her loss.

* https://changingplanet.substack.com/p/news-from-a-changing-planet-53-how
**Schlossburg, Tatiana (December 8, 2025.) “A Further Shore”. The New Yorker. Retrieved December 6, 2025.