Thanksgiving

Susan Estrich on Nov 27, 2025

It cuts to the core, through the hot air and the blue smoke and mirrors of our politics, to what really matters. Tatianna Schlossberg's essay in The New Yorker is the one thing you must read this holiday season to touch base with what is real -- including grief,but it also love and rage.

A thirty-four-year-old woman gives birth to her second child and is told she has a rare and lethal form of leukemia. She had always taken care not to bring more sorrow to her mother, Caroline Kennedy, and now it has come.

I was, to be honest, feeling sorry for myself. It was Jackie Kennedy who said you're only as happy as your least happy child. My daughter has spent the last year searching for answers that don't exist for the collection of syndromes - ME/CFS(chronic fatigue syndrome, which bears no relation to being tired); POTS; and dysautonomia -- that we collectively call "long covid." Long COVID is not like having COVID for a long time; it's what you get afterwards, it's way worse (depending on the severity of your case, the quality of life can compare with Parkinson's and late-stage cancer). And while there should be a tremendous amount of research going on, given the public health crisis we face, there isn't.

Roughly 8% of those who get COVID develop long COVID. Knowing that, we should be terrified, or at least take reasonable precautions, but we're not because we've collectively convinced ourselves that COVID isn't a problem anymore, so we don't have to live under its oppressive reign. Until we do.

If I tell you that the disease strikes especially young, fit, healthy women in their 20s and 30s, will that scare you more or less? And, I worry, will that connection be studied for what it can shed on this disease?

The day before Tatianna gave birth, nine months pregnant, she swam laps at the pool. When the doctors were talking about leukemia, she couldn't believe they were talking about her. She was "so healthy."

It is one thing to deal with things for which we can assign and accept responsibility and blame. But for what is random? We can be slow to recognize good luck as more than the product of hard work and just desserts. But bad luck? A rare form of cancer most often seen in first responders? Catastrophically bad luck. Read this piece. She is losing a life she so desperately wanted with a man she was "lucky" to find and two children she adores. Her graciousness to those who have helped her for the last year and a half is as powerful as her rage for her cousin, RFK Jr, who is cutting the funding for the research and trials and treatments she depends on. She and her parents have a thing to teach all of us about dignity.

And so, I am grateful. I am grateful to the doctors and nurses who have helped my own family in our Long COVID Journey, particularly the doctors and nurses at Mt. Sinai's Cohen Center for Recovery from Complex Chronic Illnesses, not to mention the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Foundation, and Mt. Sinai's Emergency Department, one of several we have turned to for help on our journey. I know that illness scares a lot of people away; they're not sure what to say or do, so they come around or call around less than they mean to, because what do you say?

To which the answer is simple: you say anything. People need human contact. Say what you did today. Say what you're doing for dinner, what you're watching on TV, what book you can't put down. I'm grateful to the friends of my daughters who have come around, and to the friends of mine who have put up with me. I'm grateful to my ex-husband, who has stepped up every time. I'm grateful and proud of how my daughter has weathered this storm, and continues to, even though it breaks my heart that she has to fight it. And I'm grateful once again to the Kennedy family for making us have this conversation, for sharing their love and their grief, for touching us, for calling to the better angels of our nature.

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