Woman Is Dying of Cancer, Plans to End Her Life in 2 Days (Exclusive)

Last Sunday, a small circle of close friends and family gathered to honor the life of Roseana Spangler-Sims. Some brought flowers. Some brought candy — bars of Lindt dark chocolate with orange peel, Roseana’s favorite. It was the last time many of them would ever see the 72-year-old.

One by one, they read eulogies, while Roseana, sitting in the sunshine on the deck of a rental house in the Palomar mountains north of San Diego, drank it all in.

“I didn’t expect all the love coming my way,” she tells PEOPLE of her living wake. “I was blessed to have that sense of closure with all these people. It’s something everybody should experience instead of it all being after you’re gone.”

Time is short, and precious, for Roseana On Sunday, Aug. 31 at about 6 p.m., she will ingest a lethal dose of medicine to end her life.

And she’s deeply grateful she’s able to do so. “I’m glad I can take a graceful way out of this life and this pain,” says the Vista, Calif., resident.

According to Compassion & Choices, an advocacy organization for end-of-life options, Medical Aid in Dying, or MAID, is legal in 11 states, and in Washington, D.C.

California’s law, which passed in 2015, requires an individual to be at least 18, be of sound mind, and have a terminal illness with a prognosis of six months or less to live, as determined by two doctors.

Roseana choose MAID after it became clear that her treatment for pancreatic cancer was failing, and her pain became overwhelming. “I’m 99.9% sure this cancer is going to win, so I want to quit torturing myself,” she says.

She decided to share her story, and her last days, with PEOPLE in hopes that others in similar situations can get better access to MAID: “I want it available to anyone who wants to go this route.”

Roseana was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer in April 2024, while she was already dealing with a vascular blockage. Her sudden health problems changed her life drastically.

“I used to be super active,” she says.

When she moved to California from Illinois five years ago, she fell in love with the natural spaces and miles of trails.

Her love of the outdoors began in childhood, growing up in a farming family in the town of Plainfield, then a rural outpost — and now a south suburb — of Chicago. The oldest of nine children, she was tasked with caring for her siblings after her father died when she was 12. She found her escape in the woods near their home: “I always had a reverence for nature.”

After rebellious teen years, she had two sons with a partner (“we weren’t legally married — we were hippies”), and even learned to weld. She married a musician and worked as a roadie for his band. She settled near Joliet, Ill., raised her sons and spent three decades in retail management (moonlighting in the winter driving a snow plow) before divorcing in 2010.

When she moved to California in 2020, she cleaned houses to make money, but lived for her hikes on the trails. She was making plans to move to Florida to live with her older son Shawn Cisneros, once his house there was completed.

Then she got sick.

“I’m a fighter,” she thought. She went after the cancer with everything she could. But after a year-plus of chemo and radiation, an MRI showed little progress against the disease.

She had heard about MAID long before she was sick, and it made sense to her.

“When our pets get to a certain stage where they’re in a great deal of pain, a lot of people choose to euthanize them,” she says. “I don’t see why us humans can’t decide on our own terms to end it.”

In a “worst-case” scenario, she thought, why not choose MAID?

“And stage 4 metastatic pancreatic cancer is pretty much the worst case,” she says. “Day in, day out, there’s pain. When I first wake up, I have severe pain in my stomach.”

Opioids haven’t been effective for her pain. She’s no longer able to eat regular meals. “It hurts to eat. I can’t digest food easily. I barely eat at all.” Instead, she drinks nutritional shakes. She gets confused more often. Words can fail her. She feels like her brain is in a fog.

Finally, she thought, “You know what? Hang it up. You do have this option. You don’t have to drag it out until you’re screaming in agony.”

When she shared her wishes with her family, “I was 100% on board,” says her son Shawn, 53. He had seen his wife’s mother die from pancreatic cancer 17 years ago. “We watched her dwindle away to nothing and it was terrible. To be able to go out with dignity, I support that.”

About three weeks ago, Roseana received her MAID medication, a powder that she will mix with liquid and drink this Sunday.

The reality of her short future set in.: “I’m thinking about the time that I’ve got to go…I just sat there and looked at it for a while. But it wasn’t anything that I’d go back on. It was just a reflective moment. It’s just like, I’m relieved to have this so I know that I can proceed to the next step.”

On Aug. 18, she left her one-bedroom rental for the last time and traveled an hour and a half north to a VRBO atop a mountain range that she had once hiked. The next day, her son Shawn, his wife and her twin sister joined her from Florida. (Her younger son, who has two children, lives in the midwest.)

They’ve spent the past nine days together reminiscing, telling family stories, going through photos, taking drives and watching ruby-throated hummingbirds visit the feeders hanging on the deck. Spangler-Sims taught them how to make her eggplant parmesan, Shawn’s favorite.

“Of course you have all these thoughts in the back of your mind,” Shawn says. “We’re talking, we’re laughing, and I feel like, “What if you have another month or two of good life? Do you feel like you’re shortchanging yourself? But her pain isn’t going away. It’s getting worse.”

In two days, they will be by her side when she takes her medication: “Having them physically there as my last sight is beyond comfort to me.”

And she’s having no second thoughts: “This is what life handed me. But I’m not going to go out of this life just a babbling old lady in intense pain. That ain’t happening.”