Former senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska contemplated mortality this week during an interview with the Hoover Institution on coming to terms with his own death. 

It was only in December that he took to social media to reveal his pancreatic-cancer diagnosis. 

The committed Christian has always been a champion for religious freedom, including for Jews and Catholics  — most notably in 2018, when then-judicial nominee (and now Judge) Brian Buescher was attacked by then-Sen. Kamala Harris when he was nominated for the U.S. District Court in Nebraska; Harris asked Buescher about his involvement in the Knights of Columbus, which she dubbed “an all-male society comprised primarily of Catholic men.”

It was Sen. Sasse who took it upon himself to draft a Senate resolution deeming it “unconstitutional” to consider membership in the Knights of Columbus as a disqualifying criteria for public office. The resolution, which passed, also noted other Catholic politicians who had suffered “significant anti-Catholic bigotry.”

Now, the 53-year-old husband and father of three is facing mortality head-on, discussing his prayer life, what it means “live a life of gratitude to God,” care for loved ones as well as neighbors, consider eternal questions and what truly matters — and why Jesus wept even when he knew Lazarus would be raised. 

“Death is a wicked thief,” Sasse begins. “I don’t want it to happen, but we’re mortals, and it seems like it’s not sophisticated or modern, or naive, to pretend we’re not mortals. It’s true. And so you gotta grapple with big questions, and this is not news to me that I had numbered days. It just became a more precise number. We all have numbered days.” 

Sasse shares that he was given 90 days to live, but as part of a new clinical trial, he is trying to lengthen that as much as possible to “redeem the time,” as he told Peter Robinson, host of the Hoover Institution’s Uncommon Knowledge series.

“If you’re not dead yet, you might as well redeem the time. It is a great blessing to be able to live a life of gratitude to God by doing stuff that tries to benefit your neighbor. It is a blessing to get to be co-creators, but we don’t build any storehouses that last. The things that matter and endure are human souls and things way bigger than any of my projects. We should neither be triumphalist nor despairing. Right? Nothing we build is going to last, but that doesn’t mean nothing matters. The chance to love your neighbor and serve is a blessing, and that’s what the Puritans meant by ‘redeem the time.’ I was given 90 days to live in mid-December. I got into this clinical trial. It’s really aggressive — may live a lot longer than 90 days, but don’t know how many months that is. But whether you have 90 days or 12 months, or 12 years, or 75 years left to live, we’re all gonna be pushing up daisies; and so it seems like trying to figure out what the important things are, what the eternal questions you need to wrestle through, what it looks like to see the relationship between sin and death in a broken world, and yet the chance to hug on my wife this morning, and to love my kids, and to reflect on some important questions with my friend, Peter, those are pretty good ways to redeem the time.” 

And he also lamented his workaholic mentality. 

“The really big point you hear when the clock is ticking, not to go full Cats in the Cradle, but you know I just want to say man-to-man, human-to-human, parent-to-parent, the workaholism in my soul is something I’ve repented of to my family, but I’m happy to say — not happy, I’m embarrassed but comforted to say publicly: What a mistake," Sasse said flatly. 

“In my 20s and 30s, to be so focused on a lot of work ambition, that I just made way too many stupid decisions to be on the road too many nights per month and per year. And so, if I had to do over again, I would think a lot more intentionally about how to be more ambitious in my household and to take the Lord’s Day and the Sabbath more seriously than all the ways I was a workaholic for decades.”

Turning to the digital revolution and so many questions facing civic society, especially youth, Sasse said, “Is the problem you think that they’re not going to have enough money, or that they’re not going to have enough work ethic? I’m really worried about the second question.”

From his own experience working in higher education, he said it’s not about resources, it’s about forming young people with character. 

“We don’t do self-restraint, self-discipline, self-control well enough. And so what I care about is my kids, and if I were around, my grandkids, and your listeners’ kids and grandkids, growing up where they say, ‘I want to glorify God and enjoy him forever. I want to serve him. I want to love my neighbor. I want to learn to die to self. I want to learn to do things that are the right things to do, even when they are hard and they don’t feel good.’ Right now, we’ve already had a limitless internet for 30 years. Since the mid-1990s, we’ve had the ability for every kid to get access to all the information that exists on the internet.” 

But information is not the answer, he said: It’s the condition of the human heart. 

“The problem is humans don’t have the right habits. We’re broken and we’re selfish and I need to die to self and I need to learn to love my neighbor — and that includes my wife and three kids, who I love more than anybody on earth, but I’m selfish in my behavior with them today, knowing I’m dying soon. These people are awesome. Of course, I’m a selfish jerk to some neighbor and let alone some anonymous neighbor a couple of miles away.”

And with technology, he continued, “the digital revolution is going to make us the richest people, anytime, anyplace in human history, but we’re already that. We’re the richest people anytime anyplace in human history. That is not the problem you should be solving for. The problem you should be solving for is the fact that we’re all mortals who are all selfish and we’d like to have thicker community and better loves. And that is not going to be solved by being richer, and I say this as a zealously right-wing defender of the market: Market capitalism is the best system that’s ever existed. That doesn’t mean it’s a really good religion.”

Sasse said it has been seven weeks since he was diagnosed with cancer; but for about two months prior, “something was really wrong in my body, and we couldn’t figure out what it was.”

But now, with tumors in five organs in his body, “I’ve been sleeping 15 or 16 hours a day right now because of all the drugs that I’m on; there’s just a lot of time in a hospital bed or convalescing when you get out of the hospital every week. I’m just bored out of my mind. And those [things make you consider], which is about recognizing the futility of my effort, like there was a time when I wasn’t as bored because I could delude myself that my projects were going to build a storehouse that lasted. That self-importance, the regrets about love and service, and the pain, all those lead you to pray in a different way because you have to acknowledge your finitude in a way that just, there’s less room for B.S.” 

Robinson asked him about the problem of pain and suffering, as Sasse mentioned the anguish he was currently in just sitting in the chair, with pain radiating from a tumor in his spine. 

“Pain is real, so it seems like the first thing humans should do is acknowledge that a lot is broken in this world. The existence of death is surely not the way it’s supposed to be. So Jesus weeping, what a gift. The whole Lazarus story, his sisters’ weirdly narcissistic behavior, that’s us right? We’re dying in the story too, we’re many of the characters, but we’re definitely that egotistical self-absorbed, ‘Jesus, why didn’t you do it the way I wanted you to do it?’ But to your point about short attention spans, first, let’s just go back and read that story and a dozen adjacent stories. The Bible is so rich, and we spend so little time reading it together. Jesus weeps there, and he knows he’s gonna raise Lazarus five minutes later. So it’s an amazing story because it’s acknowledging that death is terrible, and yet, death doesn’t win.”

The interview is a must-watch, especially during this Lenten season as we continue to pray for Sasse and his dear family and as we embrace the reality that, for all of us, our days are numbered. And we should act accordingly. 

Sasse quips during the interview that if he would’ve chosen a different career path, he would’ve been a football coach like his dad. So let us all take a page from the Sasse playbook these 40 days to remember we are from dust, and to dust we shall return. As Sasse said: 

“The Christian phrase in Christian literature has called death the ‘last enemy.’ Death is a wicked thief, it’s an enemy, but it’s pretty great it’s the last enemy. All the stuff that I regret, for having been an inadequate husband and son and father, friend, worker, truth-teller, all the stuff that I’ve been weak on, I’m gonna be free from all of that. Death is the last enemy.”