Andrew Ian Dodge, a former tea party activist, U.S. Senate candidate and one of the most fascinating people in Maine politics who I have ever met, has died. He was 46.

The Harpswell resident published a final post on his blog.

It read, in part:

“If you are reading this I will have succumbed to the forces of cancers that have been ravaging my body for the last little while. The last fight betwixt my body with the help of cancer treatment and cancer has not gone according to plan. The hordes of cancer plague entities have felled their host on the battlefield of life.”

Dodge’s final battle with cancer was not his first. He beat a form of the disease many years ago and shared with me photos of him receiving some experimental treatment he received in France. Dodge’s decision to show those pictures with a reporter pretty much sums up his personality. He was completely upfront about his beliefs, his life, his passions. Everything.

In 2010, I wrote a profile of Dodge for the Sun Journal in Lewiston that was also published in The Forecaster. It was but a small glimpse of the man and his complexities, but a story that might offer some perspective for those who didn’t know him.