As a Denver news staple dies, he keeps a blog.
April 4, 2002 3:59 AM   Subscribe

As a Denver news staple dies, he keeps a blog. Oh man, get the kleenex.
posted by crasspastor (7 comments total)
 
I've been a fan of Gene Amole since I was able to read. My mom had two of his books that I devoured. He was a straight-from-the-hip columnist who clearly expressed his opinions without belittling his readers.

He took a stand against building Denver International Airport, espically when the project ran into cost and scope overruns.

I respect Amole's desire to reach the end of his life, without artificially prolonging it. My grandfather recently passed away, but reading Amole's columns helped me cope with the what he went through, as well as giving me a better respect for growing old and dying.

I agree that the Rocky Mountain News seems to be milking his columns for all it's worth. But, Gene is a Denver institution, and will be missed when he's gone.
posted by jazon at 7:22 AM on April 4, 2002


this has been a really powerful story - i've heard some really sweet and sad interviews with amole & have been struck mostly by how *not* profound it is, how this is what will happen to each of us, how it is the most ordinary and everyday thing, to look back on your life - but amole has the skill to make that vivid for us.

that said, i really rolled my eyes to see you use the word "blog" here. the guy is a newspaper columnist and has been for many many years. those columns are now online. what makes that a blog?
posted by judith at 8:53 AM on April 4, 2002


I've never heard of Gene Amole, but how remarkable that he's writing so forthrightly about something that everyone thinks about but most people don't talk about.

Makes me think a little of Lewis Grizzard, who was a syndicated humor columnist at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the author of a whole buncha books before he died in 1994. He went through four heart surgeries and a three-week coma, and wrote about the "pig valve" they put in him and all the rest of it, in his columns and in books like They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat and I Took a Lickin' and Kept on Tickin' (And Now I Believe in Miracles). He knew how to write poignantly, and did so for columns about his dog or his mother or other things, but where his own health problems were concerned, he usually stuck to his standard humor routine, which is to say: cranky and Southern, not necessarily in that order. When he finally died, many, many people took it hard---I for one cried like a baby---because he'd been sharing so much of his ordeal with all of us for so long. We all felt 'involved,' and I'm pretty sure a lot of us just expected that it wasn't possible for him to actually die, because then who would there be to crack wise about the gory details of open-heart surgery?
posted by Sapphireblue at 9:45 AM on April 4, 2002


Sure, this is nice but it's not a weblog. It's a journal/diary. Where are the links?

A good read, though.
posted by camworld at 10:33 AM on April 4, 2002


Yeah, I thought about my use of the designation 'blog', and realized it was a misnomer after I'd posted it. It is just a diary in a blog appearing format. I was tired and went to bed directly after posting. Sorry for the confusion.
posted by crasspastor at 1:15 PM on April 4, 2002


Oh oh oh. My mother died of cancer a few years ago, and this brings it all back: what could and could not be said, to family and to others. The at first gradual and then precipitous disentegration of personality, from dignified farewells to gasping surrender. I hated it, and I know she did too. But there is no other way to die, apart from the swift death of fatal injury.

How lovely it would be, to say goodbye, make our peace with the world, and then expire, having said and done all that we are capable of. I wish it for me and all of you.

G'night.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 5:02 AM on April 5, 2002


Unexpectedly, of unbeatable natural causes, in untroubled sleep.
posted by Opus Dark at 5:21 AM on April 5, 2002


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