The mother of Ronan Thompson, who inspired Taylor Swift’s track “Ronan,” penned an emotional online tribute to Tatiana Schlossberg.
Maya Thompson, whose blog detailed her late son’s battle with neuroblastoma and moved Swift, 35, to pay her respects through her art in 2012, took to Instagram on Sunday, November 23, to reflect on Schlossberg’s essay for The New Yorker that detailed her own terminal cancer diagnosis.
Maya included a screenshot of the essay, published by the outlet one day prior and serving as the first public reveal of Schlossberg’s diagnosis, alongside a lengthy message to her followers.
“Tatiana is not imagining this pain. She is living inside it. She is trying to memorize the faces of the people she loves. She writes about her son and how she watches him play, trying to hold every detail in her mind,” Maya wrote. “Reading her words brought me back to the hospital nights.” (Schlossberg shares two children with husband George Moran: a 3-year-old son and an 18-month-old daughter.)
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Ronan died in May 2011 after suffering Stage 4 neuroblastoma. He was three days away from his fourth birthday.
Schlossberg, 35, who is the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and a cousin of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., revealed in her essay that she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. She has been given one year to live.
Maya’s tribute continued, “Never in my life have I cried the way I cried reading this article. When writing tells the truth, it does more than inform. It reaches in and touches something wordless. I paid to read it, and I would pay again. It should be placed gently into the hands of anyone who still believes life arrives with certainty. Anyone who has not yet had their world changed by a single sentence from a doctor. Anyone who has forgotten how sacred a heartbeat really is.”
Maya then wrote of the heartbreaking impact she felt when reading Schlossberg’s words. “But I do not just understand this piece. I live inside it because of Ronan,” her caption read. “My son taught me what it means to love while time is running out. He taught me that hope and fear can live in the same breath. He showed me that memory is something you begin to protect the moment you realize you might outlive the moments you wish could stay. Once you have lived that kind of truth, you no longer look at life the same way. You listen deeper. You hold tighter. You begin to love in a way that doesn’t wait for permission.”
Reflecting on the time she spent with Ronan inside the hospital throughout his illness, Maya recalled, “The hushed voices. The thin blankets. The long shadows across the floor. The way courage sometimes looks like simply staying in the room when your heart wants to run. I felt all of it again. The ache that never really leaves. The quiet kind of love that keeps you breathing even when everything hurts.”
Turning back to Schlossberg, Maya continued, “She writes about her husband sleeping on the hospital floor. She writes about life beginning and ending at once. She writes with clarity and tenderness, like someone who loves this world too much to ever be ready to leave it.”
Maya concluded her passage with comments regarding the devastation of such an experience on a family’s life. “This is what illness really is. Not statistics. Not charts. It is someone counting ordinary moments as though they are diamonds. It is someone realizing they might become memories before they are ready,” she wrote. “It is someone whispering the names of the people they love into the night and hoping they will be remembered.”
