In a year of tremendous losses, the devastating news of the death of Tatiana Schlossberg daughter of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, feels almost unbearable as we close out the year.

This “annus horribilis” can’t end soon enough.

The brilliant environmental journalist and young mother was only 35.

Last month, as I read her moving essay in the New Yorker where she courageously revealed her battle with a rare form of leukemia, I felt shocked. Then waves of sorrow came over me as I absorbed the gravity of her eloquent words.

Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and her 2 daughters, Rose and Tatiana

Like so many, I immediately thought of her mother, Caroline.

Please, I prayed, even though I’m not the praying type, not one more tragedy for this woman, this good woman we feel we somehow know because we have grown up with her. This icon, burdened by all too many private tragedies, were ones we have all borne witness to.

Caroline Kennedy places her hand under the flag-draped coffin as Jacqueline Kennedy kisses the casket of her husband, President John Kennedy, lying in state in the rotunda of the US Capitol. Nov. 24, 1963 Photo: Henry L Griffin/AP

That the tragic news of Tatiana Schlossberg’s terminal cancer diagnosis was revealed to the public on November 22  was particularly heartbreaking.

On the very day we remembered the death of the grandfather, she never knew, President John F. Kennedy, my thoughts went to her mother Caroline, the once upon a time little girl in the powder blue coat that matched her younger brother John Johns coat at their father’s funeral.

The heart-wrenching image of her small gloved hand reaching beneath the flag-draped casket to touch his coffin stays with me 62 years later. This little girl was just 5 days shy of her 6th birthday when her father was killed.

The Kennedy family should always hold a special place in our American hearts.

Her personal tragedies were touchstones in our lives. The loss of her father, our young, vigorous president, felled at the hands of an assassin, was the first crack in our American Dream.

RFK Funeral June 7, 1968

Five years later, the brutal shooting of her beloved Uncle Bobby had shattered our hope. Our hearts broke as we watched this 10-year-old girl in St Patrick’s Cathedral praying next to her widowed mother, praying for her uncle who had become a surrogate father.

John and Caroline watch their mother’s casket May 1994

Through the years, there were numerous devastating accidental deaths of young Kennedy cousins. The sad death of her mother, Jackie, gone too soon at 64, was the last link to Camelot. How could she possibly bear the tragic plane crash only a few years later in 1999 that took her brother John Kennedy Jr. and sister in-law Carolyn?

How unbearable to learn that the sole survivor of this family that has had more than its share of unthinkable tragedies must shoulder one more.

How much pain can one family endure?

How can we make sense of any of this?

In a year of senseless tragedies, nothing makes sense.