May's Surprise: How Jack Schlossberg Honored His Sister's Hope

There’s something about springtime that makes people talk about renewal, and Jack Schlossberg just proved why. On what would’ve been his sister Tatiana’s 36th birthday, the 33-year-old posted an Instagram video that wasn’t really about May at all—it was about learning to see beauty in the unexpected, even when you’re carrying unbearable grief.

For nearly a minute, Schlossberg walks viewers through his philosophy on May. Unlike April, when you expect the tulips and flowers to arrive on schedule, May hits different. It’s when the buds you thought might be dead suddenly burst into bloom. It’s when nature surprises you. It’s when things feel like they might actually be okay. The caption was simple:“It’s gonna be OK !!”But the context is everything.

Tatiana Schlossberg died in December 2025 at age 35, after a brutal fight with acute myeloid leukemia. She left behind her husband George Moran and two young children—Edwin, 3, and Josephine, 23 months. Just before she passed, she’d written a deeply personal essay for The New Yorker revealing her diagnosis: a rare mutation called Inversion 3 discovered after her second child was born. Doctors gave her roughly a year to live. She had chemotherapy, a bone marrow transplant at Memorial Sloan Kettering, and a clinical trial of CAR-T-cell immunotherapy starting in January 2025. But the hardest part wasn’t the treatment. It was the thought of what she’d miss.

In her essay, Tatiana described her deepest fear with unflinching honesty: her children wouldn’t remember her. Her son might confuse actual memories with photos and stories. Her infant daughter had spent nearly half her first year separated from her mother due to infection risks after the transplant. Tatiana wasn’t sure her daughter would even recognize her as“mom”when she was gone. That’s the kind of heartbreak that doesn’t have a treatment protocol.

So when Jack speaks about May’s surprise and delight, when he talks about things being okay, he’s not pretending the pain goes away. He’s learning to live with it the way his sister had to—by finding moments of unexpected grace and holding them close. That’s what the video really is: a brother saying goodbye in the language of blooming flowers, and promising that life, like May, has a way of surprising you when you need it most.

The family announced Tatiana’s death through the JFK Library Foundation, noting she’d always be in their hearts. And in Jack’s words about May, she absolutely is.