‘Not Dead Yet’: Sasse Reflects on Mortality, Work, and Regrets in New Interview
by John Gage
Former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse gave an update on his cancer diagnosis and reflected on life in an interview aired Tuesday by Uncommon Knowledge. He said that his form of pancreatic cancer has a ninety-seven percent death rate, and that his diagnosis “was worse than average.”
Sasse joked that his family is getting through the diagnosis with “gallows humor.” “When you get an already metastasized cancer diagnosis that says you have cancer in five kinds of cancer already, you tend to be more honest and blunt,” he said.
Redeem the Time, Launch a Podcast
During a question about how he would “redeem the time” with his remaining days to live, Sasse mentioned he is planning on launching a new podcast next month. “I have a podcast that is going to be launched in a couple of weeks that I have been deliberating with some buddies on for seven years, and multiple times let perfect be the enemy of the good, and we never got it off the ground,” he said. “And then we decided in October to do it, and then in December, when I was diagnosed, we decided to still do it.”
Sasse said he is going to name the podcast “Not Dead Yet,” a reference to the movie Monty Python. “You're not dead yet, you might as well redeem the time,” he said. “Redeeming the time in my theology means 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.”
Sasse On His Political Career
Sasse was asked in the interview whether he thought it was worthwhile for himself to get involved in politics. “Theoretically, absolutely,” he said. “There is no doubt that a framework for ordered liberty is necessary. Power and coercion and restraint of evil are not the center of anyone’s loves. They shouldn’t be. Your worldview is pretty distorted if politics becomes the central thing. And yet because the world is broken, it is important work.”
The former senator, when asked about the current state of politics, said he places the majority of blame on inaction in Congress. “Most of the people in the Legislature really just wish they were TikTok stars,” he said. “They don’t really want to do stuff legislatively. So we don’t pass anything.”
“The Congress is filled with folks who are desperate to keep that job that they don’t want to do anything that upsets anybody. So nobody takes any risk,” he said. “You got to elect different kinds of people. People who are super skeptical of politics. Not people who spent their whole life trying to get to Washington, but people who view it kind of as Cincinnatus-style or George Washington-style.”
Sasse said the decline in political discourse is a result of the “weirdo-fication” of the types of people who get engaged politically. “They are overrepresented. We need a lot more normies to get back in and engage in politics a little bit,” Sasse said. He added that if he were to go back and be re-engaged in politics, he would have made “that case more aggressively” to get the “normies” involved.
Any Regrets?
When asked about regrets and whether he prioritized the right things in life, Sasse said he wished he had provided more balance in his work and home life earlier on in his career.
“The workaholicism in my soul is something I’ve repented of to my family,” he said. “What a mistake, 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.”
“If I had to do it over again, I would think much more intentionally about how to be more ambitious in my household, and to take the Lord’s Day and the Sabbath more seriously,” he added.
The Last 60 Seconds
Sasse, in his statement on X, formerly Twitter, announcing his cancer diagnosis, stated that, “you can play a lot of basketball in the last 60 seconds.” When asked what he wanted to get done in those 60 seconds, he stated his top priority was continuing to be a better dad.
“When you get a precise date on how soon you are going to die — I went through the question of, if I can fight to get into a clinical trial and a lot of what will happen in that hospital is going to be kind of nasty — why do you really want to do it?” he said. “And I felt a duty to try and get into a clinical trial and to fight to live a little while longer, chiefly because I have a young kid still at home and he needs a dad to slap him upside the head a little longer.”
“I want to be a good dad for a little while longer.”
– John Gage is the Executive Editor of The Plains Sentinel.
