George Moran Breaks His Silence: “I Don’t Know How to Go On Without Her…” – The Heartbreaking Reality After Losing Tatiana Schlossberg

The family huddled together in the dimly lit room, voices barely above a whisper. “We can’t live without her,” they repeated through streams of tears. Tatiana Schlossberg, the brilliant environmental journalist, devoted wife, and tender mother, is no longer here. She left behind her husband, Dr. George Moran, and their two small children—Edwin, four, and Josephine, just one year old. What remains are fragments of a life cut short: half-finished stories, children’s drawings taped to the fridge, and a silence that feels unbearable.

For the first time since Tatiana’s death on December 30, 2025, George Moran has agreed to speak publicly. Sitting in their Manhattan apartment, sunlight filtering through half-closed blinds, he speaks quietly but with unmistakable pain. “I don’t know how to go on without her,” he says, staring at a photograph on the mantel—Tatiana laughing on a beach in Maine, wind in her hair, Edwin clinging to her leg. “Every morning I wake up expecting her to be there, making coffee, teasing me about my terrible taste in music. And every morning the truth hits again. She’s gone.”

Tatiana Schlossberg was only 35 when acute myeloid leukemia (AML) took her. The diagnosis came like a thunderclap in the summer of 2024, mere weeks after she gave birth to Josephine. She had just swum a full mile in open water while nine months pregnant; she had crossed the Hudson River in a charity swim the year before. No one—least of all Tatiana—imagined that her body was quietly harboring an aggressive, rare form of blood cancer marked by the Inversion 3 genetic mutation, one of the most difficult subtypes to treat.

The first signs were subtle. Fatigue that wouldn’t lift. Bruises appearing without reason. Then came the blood work after delivery: a white blood cell count of 131,000 per microliter. “It’s not leukemia,” she told George in those first stunned hours. But it was.

From that moment, their life became a relentless calendar of hospital stays, infusions, bone marrow biopsies, and hope stretched thin. Tatiana underwent multiple rounds of intensive chemotherapy. She received a stem-cell transplant from her sister Rose—whose donated cells, bizarrely, carried the faint scent of canned tomato soup, triggering allergic reactions in Tatiana’s already fragile system. A second transplant followed from an anonymous donor in the Pacific Northwest. She enrolled in experimental CAR-T cell therapy. Each treatment bought time, but the cancer kept returning.

Her body paid a terrible price. Cytokine release syndrome brought spiking fevers and organ stress. Graft-versus-host disease caused painful rashes and gastrointestinal torment. An Epstein-Barr virus reactivation damaged her kidneys. Muscle wasting stole her strength until the once-athletic woman who loved long-distance swimming could barely walk across the room.

Yet through every brutal round, Tatiana remained unmistakably herself. In November 2025 she published “A Battle With My Blood” in The New Yorker—an essay so raw and luminous that it left readers breathless. “When you are dying,” she wrote, “at least in my limited experience, you start remembering everything. Images come in flashes—people and places and stray conversations—and refuse to stop.” She described the guilt she felt toward her mother, Caroline Kennedy, who had already endured the assassinations of her father and uncle, the plane-crash death of her brother. “For my whole life, I have tried to be good… 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 also wrote about small, defiant joys. How one of her chemotherapy drugs, cytarabine, was originally derived from a Caribbean sea sponge—connecting her environmental passions directly to her survival. How she dictated notes for a book she dreamed of writing about the world’s oceans even as machines beeped around her hospital bed. How she insisted on FaceTiming her children every single day, no matter how weak she felt.

George was there for every moment. As a urology resident at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, he understood the medical language, but nothing prepared him for being both doctor and husband in the same nightmare. “She would get angry sometimes—from the steroids, from the fear—and then she’d apologize,” he recalls. “She’d say she felt robbed of our future. I’d try to joke, tell her, ‘You’re the genius I found—kind, funny, handsome? Wait, that’s me.’ She’d laugh, even when it hurt to laugh.”

Their children anchored them both. Edwin would crawl onto the hospital bed (when infection protocols allowed) and ask why Mommy had so many “boo-boos.” Josephine, too young to understand, would reach toward the screen during video calls, babbling at the face she knew from photos and lullabies. Tatiana could not hold her newborn daughter for months because of the infection risk. That separation, George says, was one of the cruelest parts.

In the final weeks, the family gathered often. Caroline and Edwin Schlossberg helped with childcare and kept vigil. Rose and Jack Schlossberg gave blood, stem cells, endless emotional support. Extended Kennedy cousins—Kerry, Joe III, and others—flowed in and out of hospital rooms and later the private funeral at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola on January 5, 2026.

At the service, George delivered a eulogy that friends describe as both shattering and luminous. He asked everyone to keep Tatiana alive by staying playful, solving crosswords, listening with real attention, speaking uncomfortable truths, and laughing until it hurt. “That was her,” he told the mourners. “That is still her.”

Now the apartment feels both too full and too empty. Edwin asks where Mommy went and whether she’ll come back from her “long nap.” Josephine grabs at empty air when she sees her mother’s face on the fridge. George has taken indefinite leave from his residency. Friends and family rotate through to help with bedtime stories, grocery runs, laundry. Caroline spends entire days with the grandchildren, reading them the same ocean books Tatiana once loved.

“I tell Eddie stories about her every night,” George says. “How she swam across rivers for fun. How she wrote articles that made people care about the planet. How she once beat me at Scrabble using only three-letter words and still made it look effortless.” He pauses, voice catching. “Josie will know her through videos, through the way her brother talks about her, through the smell of the books she used to read aloud. But they’ll grow up asking why. And I don’t have an answer that feels big enough.”

Tatiana’s work continues to ripple outward. Inconspicuous Consumption, her 2019 book on the hidden environmental toll of daily life, has seen a surge in sales and classroom adoptions since her passing. Donations to leukemia research foundations—especially those focused on rare AML subtypes—have spiked after her New Yorker essay circulated widely. Environmental organizations she supported report an outpouring of new volunteers inspired by her clarity and humor.

George keeps a small wooden box on the dresser filled with notes Tatiana wrote during treatment: reminders to drink water, silly drawings for the kids, a single line that reads, “Tell them I loved the whole noisy, messy, beautiful world.” He reads it when the grief feels like it might swallow him.

Outside, New York moves on—sirens, subway rumble, people rushing to meetings. Inside this apartment, time has slowed to the rhythm of small children waking from naps and a father learning, breath by breath, how to carry a love that no longer has a living body to hold it.

“We can’t live without her,” George says again, almost to himself. Then he looks toward the children’s room, where Edwin is building a tower of blocks and Josephine is chewing on a soft stuffed whale. “But we have to. For them. Because she would want us to keep going—laughing, fighting for what’s right, remembering the ocean is still out there waiting.”

And somewhere, in the stories he tells, in the waves she loved, in the children who carry her features and her fierce curiosity, Tatiana Schlossberg remains.