‘Happy Last Birthday Ben!’: Sasse Faces Death With Faith And Resolve
(ANALYSIS) On his 54th birthday, former U.S. Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska was given a cake that proclaimed, “Happy last Birthday Ben!”
“I have the best friends,” the former senator wrote on Feb. 22, his smiling face weary from chemotherapy as he held the cake in a social media post.
Two days before Christmas, Sasse released a letter stating, "Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.”
He recently offered an update in a Hoover Institution interview timed for Ash Wednesday, when millions of Christians are marked with an ash cross on their foreheads, while hearing: “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”
In December, doctors said he may have 90 days to live, which means he may not make it through Lent to Easter, which falls on April 5 this year in Western churches.
Peter Robinson, host of the “Uncommon Knowledge” interview series, asked: "Instead of withdrawing from the world, you are throwing all that you have left into it. How come?”
“I'm with Paul when he says, ‘To live is Christ, to die is gain,’” said Sasse, quoting the Epistle to the Philippians. “Obviously, death is a wicked thief. I don't want it to happen, but we're mortals. ...
“We don't build any storehouses that last,” he continued. “The things that matter and endure are human souls. ... We should be neither triumphalist nor despairing. ... 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.”
A Harvard University graduate, Sasse earned a doctorate in history from Yale University before working in business, politics and academia. He served in the U.S. Senate from 2015 until 2023, when he briefly became president of the University of Florida. Just before his cancer diagnosis, Sasse became a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He has started a podcast called “Not Dead Yet,” with a nod to the British humor of “Monty Python.”
Conservative commentator Megan Basham was preparing to record a Daily Wire video when she clicked to watch the Sasse interview. "Wasn't thinking," she wrote on X, adding that she begged for a break to repair her makeup. Basham received a Stage III cancer diagnosis in 2024, before a 2025 scan pushed her into Stage IV.
“I will unashamedly confess that I do not want Ben Sasse's story to be my story," wrote Basham. “But if it is, please God give me the strength to face it with his level of confidence in your will, grace and love. And give me the strength to recognize the tremendous honor of being a witness to the power of Christ through suffering as Sasse has been.”
During the Hoover video, Sasse frequently squirmed in his chair when hit by pain from the tumors in his spine, despite doses of morphine.
When asked about the faith issues during this ordeal, Sasse said: "There's never been a piece of me that has doubted the question: Is God surprised by the fact that Ben Sasse's torso is chock full of tumors? ... The God who'd be surprised by it is way too small to be interesting. God is not surprised by the fact that I'm gonna die. ... We're all gonna die.”
With "the clock ticking," he added that the big question is how to use whatever time he has left. He has found comfort in the Bible's shortest verse, "Jesus wept.”
“Pain is real,” he said. “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," said Sasse. “Jesus weeps there, and he knows that he's gonna raise Lazarus five minutes later. So, it's an amazing story because he's acknowledging that death is terrible, and yet death doesn't win. ...
He continued: “Death is a wicked thief. It's an enemy, but it's pretty great that it's the last enemy. All the stuff that I regret for having been an inadequate husband and son and father and friend and worker, truth-teller, all the stuff that I've been weak on, I'm gonna be freed from all of that. Death is the last enemy.”
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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.