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Substack
Ross Douthat shared with me his impressions after interviewing Ben Sasse, the former senator who is facing terminal cancer. Ross mentioned that Sasse’s face bears the heavy physical toll of his current treatment—bloodied as a side effect. Yet, that description didn't fully prepare me for the interview itself. Ross was deeply moved by the experience, noting Sasse’s extraordinary spiritual witness and the joy and hope he maintains through the agony of his illness.
There is nothing I could write that would surpass the testimony this man of faith, heroic in his suffering, offers in the interview.
Excerpts:
Sasse: I did not decide to die in public. I obviously ended up with a calling to die. In mid-December I got a three- to four-month life expectancy, and I’m at Day 99 or something since then, and I’m doing a great deal better than I was doing at the end of the year.
But even with only a few months left to live, you have to redeem the time. There’s only so many bits of unsolicited advice I can give my children. So, you journalists want to talk, and if you don’t have anybody better, I’m your man. I’ll be your huckleberry.
More:
So, I have pancreatic cancer—Stage 4, already metastasized. They told me right away on Day 1, “This is not operable.” They told me over the course of the next couple of days that I already have five forms of cancer: lymphoma, vascular, lung cancer, bad liver cancer and pancreatic, where it originated. So, it was pretty clear that we’re dealing with a short number of months left to live.
After the talk of illness, Douthat turns his questioning to politics. I was amazed by what Sasse had to say about how a hundred years from now, nobody will be talking about the politics of this era. They will be talking about how smartphones changed us. That is a major theme of my recent writing as well; it is clear to me now that what economic calamity was to previous generations, technology is to whatever is going to happen to us in the near future.
Not unrelated, Sasse on his time in the Senate:
Sasse: … It did start a little bit before 2016 because I got elected in 2014, and by the end of 2015, I was in trouble with my party at home for not hating my opponents enough. And I was like, “But I don’t. There are 330 million Americans.”
Douthat: What was a concrete example of that?
Sasse: That I didn’t spend time going on the angriest media channels to entertain conspiracy theories. Those things became a marker for people to say, “I really dislike those other people.”
What I care about is the impulse to say, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,” and that you don’t pass it along in the bloodstream, you pass it along because we teach it—and we haven’t been teaching it for a long time.
Our civics experience is in collapse. At this point, I would talk about what was happening on college campuses—it has become much worse in the decade since—but at that point, there was some polling that showed just over 35 percent of American college kids thought the First Amendment was dangerous because you might use your freedom of speech to say something that hurt somebody else’s feelings.
The whole point of America is that we lay down our weapons outside the tent, and you go into the tent and you say: Speech cannot be violence, and violence is not a form of speech. What we believe here is that everybody is created in the image of God. They have universal rights. We need to celebrate the American civic tradition together, but I was in trouble with some of my voters for not being angry enough.
The modern algorithm lives on hate. I’m not going to quote him further on politics, because I really want you to read the interview—or better, watch it. A man suffering like he is, with no hope of survival, has every reason to be despondent, yet he is joyful. He tells us why:
Sasse: I got my diagnosis in mid-December. I was incredibly blessed to be quickly at peace. I kept thinking of the idea that to live is to serve God, and to die is a gain.
Death is terrible. We should never sugarcoat it. It is not how things are meant to be. But it is significant that death can be called the final enemy. It’s an enemy, but it’s a final enemy, and there will then be no more tears.
I believe in the restoration of this world and the life to come. So, I did not feel great fear about my death. I didn’t want the pain I was going through. I didn’t want to be a coward in the final moments.
More:
We’re all on the clock, and I wanted to have prioritized better. Whether I really only have three or four months left, or if I get nine to 12 months, I want to prioritize better.
In my faith tradition, the need for daily repentance is just a truth. I am broken. I leave undone those things which I ought to have done, and I do those things which I ought not to have done. I get to repent every day of both my sins of omission and commission. And yet, if you’re only going to get three or four months, you really want to get some of your affairs in order.
This is the part that reduced me to tears:
Sasse: … A mentor of mine who also died of pancreatic cancer said: I hate pancreatic cancer. I would never wish it on anyone, but I would never want to go back to a time in my life where I didn’t know the prayer of pancreatic cancer.
Meaning I now, in the midst of this disease, know much more the truth of my finitude than I ever let myself believe in the past. The hubristic nonsense—I believe in God and I’m grateful and blessed, but I can act as if I am self-sufficient.
I can act as if I have enough resources that I can operate without a need, but that’s not true. I can’t keep the planets in orbit. I can’t even grow skin on my face.
Americans like to make fun of Europe for being “lazy”. I tell you, whenever I return to the US from Europe, I can really see the difference in the philosophical attitudes of the peoples, attitudes of which Americans are scarcely aware. We Americans, in general, do not know how to rest, or at least rest well. We define ourselves by our work. One of the first questions Americans ask each other when strangers meet is, “What do you do for a living?” That’s not the case in Europe. Our American stance — and I was guilty of this too — finds leisure unnatural. Or, it construes it as a thing captured in the phrase “work hard, play hard.” His view is more like the way pious Jews observe the Sabbath: as a time of meaningful rest. It is the Sabbath that makes the rest of the week meaningful. Lo, here’s what Ben Sasse says he has learned about the Sabbath as he moves towards the grave:
No. 1, honor the Sabbath and keep it holy. Man, I wish I’d treated the Lord’s Day differently over the course of my life. I’ve always known it, believed in it and thought: Maybe next week we’ll get better.
Boy, I would treat Sabbaths differently — and especially digital intrusions into the Sabbath.
I kept crying through the rest of it. I wish I had known Ben Sasse in real life. He wears his mortality easily. It is the face of a man who seeks God.
