There was a stark difference between who Sheryl Randall was most of her life and who she had become when she tied a rope around her neck last year.
Randall, 67, was a financial planner in Evergreen. She liked to travel. She loved to hike. She had strong opinions, lots of friends and a big laugh you could hear no matter how far ahead or behind she was on the mountain.
Her laugh echoed, friends say.
“I can hear it in my head,” says Janet Williamson of Evergreen.
About five years ago, Randall started having trouble eating. She went from doctor to doctor in search of why she couldn’t keep food down. She started losing weight and energy until she stopped showing up for the hikes she used to take every Wednesday with friends. In time, she couldn’t hike – her greatest joy. Eventually, there were days when she couldn’t walk or get out of bed at all. Brushing her teeth or holding a book exhausted her.
Randall was first diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, but later doctors said she had a mitochondrial disease that was slowly attacking her organs. Food became difficult for her to swallow. She subsisted mainly on pear juice and brown rice, weighing every morsel she ate, trying to keep her weight up. But nothing worked. By winter 2015, she was down to about 80 pounds.
“She told me the last time I talked to her that she had about 40 minutes of energy a day,” says her friend, Joan Edmunds of Denver.
As Randall grew weaker, she became impatient with herself and friends, lashing out over things that in healthier days they’re sure wouldn’t have mattered to her. The most she could do was sit on her deck watching the seasons pass or lie in bed listening to recorded books about places she still hoped to travel.
“Her world was closing in on her,” says friend Janet Prehn of Arvada. “It was so sad to watch this awful progression as she just continually, continually, continually, continually went downhill.”
Randall arranged for hospice workers to help as her body broke down. She refused care from friends.
In the winter of 2015, she phoned Williamson, who has stage 4 breast cancer, to ask if she ever thought about suicide.
“I said I did,” Williamson says.
Williamson asked Randall what quality of life she had.
“She said ‘None. I don’t want to live this way.’”
Williamson urged her friend to move to Oregon or Washington, where aid in dying is legal.
“She said ‘I can’t get there, I can’t move that much.’”
Williamson offered to drive her.
“She said, ‘I can’t drive in a car that long.’ She had waited too long in hopes that she would get better.”
About a month later, in March 2015, Randall wrote letters to a few friends saying she had suffered too long and had enough. She notified Jefferson County Sheriff’s office, calling or writing – her friends aren’t sure and the department isn’t saying – to tell them where she lived, how to get into her house and what she was about to do. Then she hanged herself.
As methodical and thorough as Randall was in every other aspect of her life, her friends have no doubt that she researched her options. They cringe to think of her combing the web for the surest way to die. The thought of her threading a rope around her neck haunts them. And they kick themselves as the would-haves and should-haves play in their minds.
Given Randall’s fierce sense of friendship, they’re sure that she didn’t want them taking the legal risk of helping her die. They’re also sure, given her independence, that she didn’t want them trying to talk her out of it.
“But I wouldn’t have,” says friend Nancy Kranzow of Denver. “I understood why she did it. Her life wasn’t her own any more.”
“She was obviously amazingly desperate to do it the way she did,” adds Edmunds. “She was very, very ready to go.”
The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department wouldn’t release its report on her suicide, citing privacy reasons.
Randall’s sister, who lives out of state, asked The Independent not to reveal Randall’s identity in this story. “She was a very private person,” she said.
But Randall’s friends – seven of whom agreed to be interviewed – say she would have wanted her story told if it could help spare others. Now that voters will have a chance to decide whether to legalize medical aid-in-dying in Colorado, one friend after the next said her story needs to be heard.
“It would have been so much easier to know she could just take something and it would have been over,” Prehn says.
Five states – representing 16% of the U.S. population – currently allow medical aid in dying. They are Oregon, Washington, Vermont, Montana and California. Colorado is the only state slated to consider a ballot initiative this November.
The proposed End-of-Life Options Act is modeled after Oregon’s, which was the first state to pass a medical aid-in-dying law in 1997. Since then, 1,545 Oregonians have had prescriptions written under the law and 991 have died from ingesting the medications. Last year in Oregon, there were 218 prescriptions filled and 132 used.
Colorado’s proposal, like Oregon’s law, would require patients to be 18 or older, mentally capable, residents of Colorado, confirmed by two doctors to be terminally ill (with six months or less to live), and able to administer the medication themselves. Most commonly, doctors prescribe a barbiturate or a mix of drugs, including a sedative. The aim: a death more peaceful than Randall’s.
“The violence of what Sheryl did, it was awful,” Kranzow says.
“We were all shocked. Hanging herself. I can’t fathom going through something like that,” adds Prehn.
It’s hard to know how many cases like Randall’s there are in Colorado because the state health health department doesn’t keep statistics on how many terminally ill take their own lives,
Compassion & Choices, the national group behind the aid-in-dying movement, coalesced at the height of the AIDS epidemic when terminally ill patients were committing suicide by jumping off balconies, kneeling in front of trains and other violent means. They committed to working to ensure more peaceful deaths. As president Barbara Coombs Lee tells it, the ability to die peacefully “is a core value of a life well lived.”
“People take actions that are desperate when they’re powerless in the face of an approaching, certain, horrific death,” she says. “We know this tragedy of violence among the terminally is totally preventable.”
Advocates say aid-in-dying not only assures peace of mind for patients, but also for their family and friends. Suicides like Randall’s, Coombs Lee says, leave survivors “with a lot of difficult images, second guessing and guilt wondering how could they have prevented it, how could they have relieved the desperation.”
The Archdiocese of Denver opposes the measure on grounds that human life is sacred at every stage. Its spokesperson did not return phone calls seeking further comment.
Some disability activists also oppose the ballot initiative, fearing that, in the face of lifelong care and medical expenses, the law could be misused to euthanize people with disabilities.
Like Randall, Carrie Ann Lucas, a disability lawyer helping lead the opposition against the ballot measure, also has a mitochondrial disease. Although she realizes such conditions “can manifest in a million different ways,” she wonders if psychiatric care could have prolonged Randall’s will to live. In any case, Lucas says doctors are terrible at evaluating quality of life issues and fears that – either because of pressures from depressed patients or insurance companies’ cost concerns – physicians may prescribe lethal drugs rather than mental health treatment. She also notes that aid-in-dying prescriptions are similar to lethal injections used in prisons to carry out the death penalty.
“As we know from several botched executions in Oklahoma, that’s not necessarily a non-violent death, either,” she says.
Randall had left specific wishes that there be no service after her death. So, instead, her friends gathered one morning in June for a hike in her memory.
The air was crisp and the sun bright as they trekked along Mount Falcon. They tried to remember how much fun Randall was and how much life she had. They missed the echo of her laughter on the mountain.
But nobody on that trail that morning could forget what they all imagined about Randall’s last minutes. Nobody could accept that their friend, in her death, felt relegated to the underground.
“Maybe I’m projecting my own feelings on Sheryl,” Prehn says. “But, then, I knew her quite well. I feel like she wouldn’t want anybody else to go through what she went through if there was a better way to do it.”
Photo courtesy of Nancy Kranzow
We are all voting yes i hope most will as well.
my baby sister suffered horribly for months as the cancer spread throughout her body. she too sat in her bed (later she couldn’t even sit up) watching the seasons pass through a tiny square window. thanks to the amazing people at hospice at least we were able to keep her in her home up near to the end.
Her final week, hospice had to move her to the hospital. there she spent her last days in a bed with a window that faced a parking lot, not her beloved mountains.
my uncle lives in a state that does allow for physician assisted ‘suicide’ but she too when the time came couldn’t make the trip.
all i ever wanted for my sister was for her not to suffer. when there is hope that is one thing but when there is none?
nothing is more sacred imho than life but our lives and what we do with them is between us and our maker. only God can judge and the God i believe in would never force someone to end their days in terrible suffering or violently when they have another more humane kind way to leave this life.
you don’t have to believe in God to see that voting yes on this proposed change is the morally right choice. she was going to die no matter. so if you vote NO you will 100% be removing the hope for a peaceful death for many and their loved ones.
*we ALL have expiration dates from the moment of conception. what matters most, it is what we do with the days we have that makes life so precious. so our lives, our loved ones, our decisions. Vote YES just please.
i forgot in my comment to thank ms. greene for doing this story. also special thanks to the loved ones of Sheryl Randall. to open up such a painful chapter in hopes of helping others. so very kind of you.
Thank you, Mike. Susan
Thanks for the story.
Fortunately, many of the deaths I have been close to have been “good deaths” – without great suffering and relatively quick. But the exceptions are enough to make me quite aware of some hideous possibilities. One friend had pain that apparently could not be controlled even by large doses of medication. An uncle suffering and facing the possibility of a long, lingering decline chose suicide by pistol, leaving his son as suddently responsible to “clean up” literally and metaphorically.
By contrast, the medically induced deaths of my pets have been peaceful, relaxed and quick. The Oregon approach may not solve every difficulty, but is a worthwhile step.
Dear Ms. Greene -Sheryl’s out of town sister you mentioned was totally traumatized by your phone call. You were cruel and insensitive to her. Sheryl died in March of 2016, not 2015 and we are still grieving the loss. I hope you learn how to treat those who are coping with grief and loss before you harass another family like you did ours. Shame on you.
Why is it that virtually every disability right organization is opposed to assisted suicide? Why do they claim that they will suffer because they will be denied treatments and encouraged to use $200 suicide pills instead? Google some like “Not Dead Yet” and see what they are saying. Please.