Giovanni Rana

To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.

His Life

With deep sadness, we announce the passing of our beloved Giovanni Rana, who was born on June 16, 2004 in Stanford, California and passed away on December 2, 2025 in Boulder, Colorado.

We will always remember our sweet Giovanni for his kindness, for the way he prioritized time with his people, and for his joyful and silly sense of humor, which he employed to bring laughter to those around him. When you were with him, you felt his attention, his caring, his heart, and his love. You felt seen and valued for you who are. You felt the human connection. He had a purity of heart and a loyalty to his people that is rarely seen, let alone experienced. 

Giovanni spent many of his earlier years with basketball as a primary interest. Because of his beautiful jump shot and ability to score, he played competitively on several teams. But he wasn't a competitive person at heart and so basketball was primarily something that he loved as a sport and as something that he loved doing with friends. His ideal activity was casually shooting hoops with friends, with music playing in the background.

Giovanni was deeply creative and applied his talents to music, into which he poured his energies throughout life. His original interest was in the cello, which he started playing from age five. He continued that for several years, taking lessons from a fabulous teacher in Seattle. During that time, it was so lovely to hear the beautiful sounds of his cello practice at home.

In his tweens, his musical interest turned towards making the electronic music ("beats") that were used for rap music. He was naturally talented and gifted at that. So creative. Such commitment and drive. He even did all of the unglamorous work required to make that a lifelong vocation. At the young age of 15, he became a Platinum Producer when his music was used by Lil Durk for his Platinum selling album entitled The Voice. As fate would have it, the name of the song that Giovanni contributed to is "Death Ain't Easy", which is about a close friend of Lil Durk who he'd lost to violence.

Most of Giovanni's life was filled with friendships, joy, love, and brightness. During his later years, though, he did face some struggles and challenges, as do we all. To his credit, however, he was actively engaged and working through those struggles and was making great progress during his last months. We all believed that his struggles were simply one phase of his life and that the future held great hope and renewed contentment. And we wish that he would have had a chance to see and experience that brighter future.

We have all been blessed by having him in our lives and although he is no longer with us in physical form, he remains in our hearts, our thoughts, and in the ways we choose to incorporate the best of his traits into the way we live our lives. He is deeply missed because he is deeply loved.

His parents have chosen the following poem in remembrance of Giovanni:

LATE FRAGMENT
And did you get what 
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

~Raymond Carver

Juice WRLD

Music played an incredibly important role in Giovanni's life, as the focus of most of his creative energies through his career and his hobbies. Because of this, he was profoundly impacted and moved by his favorite artists. Giovanni's favorite artist by far, Juice WRLD, was one he had a special relationship with. Giovanni discovered and fell in love with Juice WRLD's music on SoundCloud in 2017, long before it received any widespread acclaim, when his eventual hit "Lucid Dreams" had fewer than 10,000 plays. Juice WRLD's music was much more emotional and vulnerable compared to other rappers at the time, which struck a chord with Giovanni's more sensitive nature. Giovanni was always very proud of having recognized Juice WRLD's talent long before the public did.

Juice WRLD passed away on December 8th, 2019. He was only 21 years old. His loss profoundly affected Giovanni, who wrote that Juice WRLD motivated him to do more not just with music, but also with life. "Life is unreal and death is uncertain," he told his sister at the time. Giovanni continued to listen to Juice WRLD's music prolifically, including posthumously released songs, in the years since his passing. His sense of kinship makes the fact that he and Juice WRLD both passed away at 21 years old even more striking.

In recognition of the importance of Juice WRLD to Giovanni's creative side, we have selected the following interview quote, which we felt best represented what Juice WRLD meant to him:

“I feel like people try to live other people’s lives or worry about what other people think about their life. That’s not the way to live at all. I realized that it’s my life and that I’m the one painting the picture that’s going to be left, so why not do everything my way?”

Cause of Death

Giovanni passed away, in his sleep, on December 2, 2025 in Boulder, Colorado. The Coroner's Office determined, after an extensive monthslong investigation, that Giovanni's death was caused by a dose of kratom that he had purchased over-the-counter from a local shop. They determined that it was not an overdose; rather they indicated that the product caused his heart to slow so much that it eventually stopped beating.

Although Giovanni had been suffering from depression and anxiety, he was always careful not to consume substances that could be dangerous. Several months before his death, he saw kratom being sold over-the-counter at a local gas station, where it was marketed as a natural supplement to help with mood and anxiety. Believing it to be a safe, he used it several times. While we do not yet know all of the details of his history with kratom, we do know that he believed it was not dangerous. We also know that just before his death, he was making plans about his future, was doing well, was reconnecting with friends and family, and would not have knowingly done something he thought was dangerous.

It breaks our heart that this unregulated and dangerous product is available so readily, over-the-counter. Although we cannot do anything to bring Giovanni back, we hope to take action to help prevent this misery to other young adults and their parents. That is why we are trying to be open about the circumstances of Giovanni's death. We hope others will help spread the word and help with advocacy to ban the public sale of kratom. 

Timeline

Gallery

Videos

Memory wall

Favorites