After a possible pancreas-kidney transplant fell through earlier this year, Andy Obermueller asked his friend Sarah Murray Tauer to drive him to his hometown of Lincoln. They visited the cemetery where Andy's father and grandparents are buried. He spent a quiet moment with their markers. (Sarah Murray Tauer)
My past and present colleague, friend and companion on the long road of type 1 diabetes, Andy Obermueller, died last week . He was 48.
It’s a punch in the gut for me, and it may be a punch in the gut for Kansas Reflector readers who followed Andy’s columns in which he detailed his wait for a kidney and pancreas transplant.
Obermueller in the Reflector
Andy received that transplant, on May 19. With the new pancreas, he was no longer diabetic. With a new kidney, he no longer received dialysis. According to his sister Kate Unruh, he named the new organs Statler and Waldorf , after the wisecracking oldsters from the Muppet Show.
Unfortunately, once Andy returned home from the hospital, he developed an infection. While most of us can fight those off, we also aren’t taking powerful anti-rejection drugs to preserve our new organs. The fight was tough. But Andy wrote on his Facebook page and in messages to me that the worst had passed. He joked about coming to work at Kansas Reflector after we advertised a job opening. After an extended period on dialysis and waiting for the transplants, he was looking toward the future.
“Most days are good. A few are not. I guess the trick is to keep going,” he wrote me via Facebook Messenger on July 2. “I’ll start looking for some sort of gig in August. That gives me a month to heal. It’s been a long road.”
Twenty days later, on July 22, Andy died in his sleep. He was buried Sunday in Lincoln.
It’s a painful loss, not only for his friends and family and daughter, but also for Kansas journalism as a whole. We all needed him.
I’m not going to say Andy wasn’t a complicated character. Like fellow gregarious spirit Walt Whitman, he contained multitudes . He stuffed a titanic amount of living into his 48 years — working at newspapers, writing financial advice columns and crafting speeches while living in Colorado, New Jersey, Arkansas, West Virginia, Texas and Idaho. Still, he returned to Kansas, and he returned to journalism.
I met Andy during my freshman year at the University of Kansas. He served as opinion editor at the University Daily Kansan student newspaper, where I contributed the occasional column and editorial cartoon.
Even then he was a memorable presence, wise and curmudgeonly beyond his years. I looked up to him as someone who understood opinion writing and how to execute it with wit and verve.
A couple of years later, I wrote a story for my advanced reporting class about challenges facing students who lived with type 1 diabetes . I was one of those students, having been diagnosed at age 8. So was he. Andy had faced challenges in managing the disease, and he spoke frankly and openly with me about his experience. He didn’t have to do so, but he knew a good story when he saw one.
Fast forward a decade and a half.
The two of us reconnected when I returned to Kansas in 2016. We both had stayed in touch with former Daily Kansan general manager Tom Eblen and his wife, Jeannie . Tom died in 2017 , and Jeannie followed in 2021 . For myself and Andy, the passing of these beloved figures made the relationships we developed during college and the memories of those days seem even more precious. We spoke of the Eblens often.
I recruited Andy for the Reflector in 2021, a few months after starting here. Now I was the opinion editor, and he was the contributor — a wise and deep and humane one. He wrote about diabetes, the raid of the Marion County Record newspaper, and his own transplant waiting game. I was excited by the possibility of him writing even more for us in the years ahead. Wry yet warm, cynical yet gentle, clear-eyed yet hopeful, his columns sounded like Kansas to me.
Kansas boasts a proud tradition of incredible journalism . I’m researching an upcoming book about great Kansas opinion writers of the last century, the grand old men and women who shaped the Sunflower State through their words. I always thought Andy was destined to become a grand old man himself. The fact that he won’t be here in the years and decades ahead leaves me, and so many others who knew him, bereft.
Yet we cannot despair. Our legacies live in the hearts of those we knew and loved. If we’re lucky enough, as Andy was, to write with power and personality , those words live on, too.
Godspeed, my friend.
Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here .
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