This article is a tribute to J. Randall Curtis, who passed away from ALS in February 2023. Throughout his career, Randy pioneered many advances at the intersection of critical care and palliative care, including developing outcome measures such as the Quality of Dying and Death and Quality of Communication instruments, recognizing missed opportunities during physician-family conferences about end-of-life care, and designing interventions to improve communication at the end-of-life. In addition to his groundbreaking research, Randy's legacy is shaped by his mentorship, which has profoundly inspired the next generation of critical care and palliative care clinicians and researchers.