Ben Sasse’s Dignity in the Face of Death

Two days before Christmas, Ben Sasse, the former Senator from Nebraska, President of the University of Florida, and devout Christian, announced on X that he had been diagnosed with “metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer.” He did not mince words; he was “gonna die.” It was one of those events where I can remember precisely where I was when the first of my friends wrote to me, asking if I had heard the news about Ben Sasse. 

Sasse’s post, which is beautifully written and well worth reading in its entirety, concedes that while death indeed pursues us all and is “a wicked thief,” Sasse’s faith remained entirely undiminished by his diagnosis: “Those who know ourselves to need a Physician should dang well look forward to enduring beauty and eventual fulfillment.” But Sasse crucially notes that “the eternal city…is not yet” and that “the process of dying is still something to be lived.” And in the time since announcing his diagnosis, despite enduring frequent waves of nausea and having to sleep upwards of fifteen hours per day, live he has. 

In recent days, Sasse launched the podcast Not Dead Yet, co-hosted with Chris Stirewalt of News Nation; authored a pair of pieces for The Wall Street Journal’s new “Free Expression” section; and sat for a much-discussed Uncommon Knowledge interview with the Hoover Institution's Peter Robinson. He has also been logging as much time as he can with family. As he told both Stirewalt and Robinson, the primary reason he is subjecting himself to a powerful experimental cancer treatment (complete, at times, with gruesome side-effects) even when his fate is already all but assured is to be able—hopefully—to spend a bit more time with his fourteen-year-old son and impart some further fatherly wisdom. Or, as Sasse put it in his interview with Robinson, compellingly titled “Basketball in the Last 60 Seconds,”1

“I have a young kid still at home, and he needs a dad to slap him upside the head a little bit longer and, and give him some advice and wrestle through some questions.”

To that point about spending time with family, the most moving portion of Sasse’s interview with Robinson (and there were indeed many moving sections) was when Sasse expressed regret for how much time he spent focused on career advancement. He now believes much of that time would have been better spent in the company of his family. In particular, he wishes he had spent fewer nights per month traveling for management consulting meetings or speaking engagements in favor of more dinners with his wife and children. Like the late Charlie Kirk, Sasse expresses his reverence for the Sabbath and wishes now he had suspended his workaholism at least one day per week. 

Approaching death seems to have imbued Sasse with an urgency to discuss many of the ills affecting American society in addition to his personal reflections. In his tour de force interview with Robinson, Sasse outlines his view that the transition from the industrial economy to what he calls the “knowledge economy” of today is more significant than the previous shift from a primarily agricultural economy to an industrial one. In line with Marshall McLuhan, Sasse states his belief that reduced attention spans in the digital age imperil a deliberative, constitutional republic that depends on arguments made chiefly through the written word. He also reminds us that we must guard against believing politics to be an end in itself. Toward the end of the episode, when the conversation turns to the ever-vexing theological problem of evil and the nature of pain and faith, Sasse memorably channels the late Tim Keller, who died in 2023 of pancreatic cancer, to say that while he would never wish that pancreatic cancer existed, he almost would not want to return to the prayer life he had prior to his diagnosis.

Unlike certain religious people, some of whom seem either fanatical or unable to be believed when they maintain they are eager to die and be reunited with God, Sasse’s comments are more in line with those of Steve Jobs’, another eventual victim of pancreatic cancer, who famously said in 2005:

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there.”

Sasse, time and again, describes death as a wicked thief and something that is abjectly terrible. Yet he still maintains, following Saint Paul, “to die is gain,” and he speaks reverently of the cemetery at St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Arlington, Nebraska, where he and his wife decided long ago they would be buried. In the transient age of remote work and the digital nomad, Sasse unapologetically subscribes to the notion of being from a particular place. 

Sasse’s interview with Robinson prompted one X user to speak for just about all of us when he wrote: “I hope I can face death someday with as much courage, integrity and dignity as Ben Sasse has.” One truly marvels at the courage with which he faces his diagnosis, welcomes the public into part of his journey, and remains active—still building and creating—even with so little time likely left.

I earnestly hope that Sasse’s experimental treatments are successful and he is with us for much longer (just as I hope we continue to make progress in combating cancer, particularly kinds as lethal as pancreatic cancer), but whatever happens, in the time since his diagnosis, through his words and deeds, he has left his listeners with much to reflect on. Mortality has a tendency to crystallize what is most fundamental, often obscured by the vicissitudes of daily life. And Sasse, with what he describes as a spine full of tumors, tells us clearly what matters. It reminds me of what I think the English essayist William Hazlitt meant when he wrote that:

“[d]eath cancels everything but truth; and strips a man of everything but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization.”

A few years ago, I began keeping a list in a notebook of the people I most admire, both living (Jimmy Lai is one) and from history (Benjamin Franklin, Anwar Sadat, et cetera). I have just added to this list Ben Sasse. 

Endnotes

1. The title comes from Sasse’s comment that “You can play a lot of basketball in the last 60 seconds.” 

Erich J. Prince is the editor-in-chief of Merion West.