When you are dying, at least in my limited experience, you start remembering everything. Images come in flashes—people and places and stray conversations—and refuse to stop. I see my best friend from elementary school as we make a mud pie in her back yard, top it with candles and a tiny American flag, and watch, in panic, as the flag catches fire. I see my college boyfriend, wearing boat shoes a few days after a record-breaking snowstorm, slipping and falling into a slush puddle. I want to break up with him, so I laugh until I can’t breathe.
Maybe my brain is replaying my life now because I have a terminal diagnosis, and all these memories will be lost. Maybe it’s because I don’t have much time to make new ones, and some part of me is sifting through the sands.
On May 25, 2024, my daughter was born at 7:05 in the morning, ten minutes after I arrived at Columbia-Presbyterian hospital, in New York. My husband, George, and I held her and stared at her and admired her newness. 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. It could just be something related to pregnancy and delivery, the doctor said, or it could be leukemia. “It’s not leukemia,” I told George. “What are they talking about?”
George, who was then a urology resident at the hospital, began calling friends who were primary-care doctors and ob-gyns. Everyone thought it was something to do with the pregnancy or the delivery. After a few hours, my doctors thought it was leukemia. My parents, Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, had brought my two-year-old son to the hospital to meet his sister, but suddenly I was being moved to another floor. My daughter was carried off to the nursery. My son didn’t want to leave; he wanted to drive my hospital bed like a bus. I said goodbye to him and my parents and was wheeled away.
The diagnosis was acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3. It was mostly seen in older patients. Every doctor I saw asked me if I had spent a lot of time at Ground Zero, given how common blood cancers are among first responders. I was in New York on 9/11, in the sixth grade, but I didn’t visit the site until years later. I am not elderly—I had just turned thirty-four.
