Facing Death, Ben Sasse Teaches Us to Live

The difference between cultural renewal and civilizational decay hinges on how we see the end of our collective story.

The argument: Ben Sasse’s confrontation with death exposes the spiritual crisis of the West: we have forgotten how our story ends, and without that ending, we do not know how to live.

WHY IT MATTERS

Sasse’s December 25 op-ed began, “Friends … Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.” But his model of hope in the face of death stands out because it presents such stark contrast to the hopelessness of our day. We live in a uniquely cynical age—one marked by conspiracy, institutional distrust, and the reflexive mocking of goodness as naïveté. In such a world, news like Sasse’s can feel like proof of Macbeth’s verdict: life is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

When cynicism becomes a cultural default, the shared story that once bound the West together begins to unravel. Centuries ago, Jonathan Edwards described much the same phenomenon in his work Charity and Its Fruits: “Immediately upon the fall, the mind of man shrank from its primitive greatness and expandedness, to an exceeding smallness and contractedness.” This is cynicism—the soul compressed around the very narrow dimensions of the self.

Nowhere is this incurvatus in se clearer than in the face of death. We’ve all seen it: family and friends who, when confronted with the prospect, knot inward like tree roots in a sandbox. They trade every warm, renewing rain for the cold comfort of safety. They start waiting to die. This spiritual contraction terrifies because we feel it happen in ourselves. We know it’s our natural posture, our human inertia—unless, with “gravelly-but-hopeful voices,” as Sasse penned, we fight, soldiering through tears. What can rouse us to struggle against this smallness of soul?

When I open a new book, I read the last page first, much to my husband’s dismay—as if knowing the ending somehow strips the journey of its joy. Not at all. It helps me marvel at the Author’s plan through pages of exposition: to notice the details, savor the days, and follow the map He has woven. It answers my nagging questions: What will our protagonist’s life amount to? Will she make it to the end? In the same way, Bunyan’s Pilgrim drowning in the River of Death cannot help but feel the silty bottom and know that “it is good”—cannot escape the stubborn, insistent, inevitable hope that endings are not truly the end. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “Death is the supreme festival on the road to freedom.” In other words, when we know the ending, we can live.

Credit: screenshot C-SPAN2

Sasse is in the middle of the novel, undergoing grueling clinical trials and intense pain, bleeding from his face that causes clotting on his pillows. He’s had to tell his daughters he won’t walk them down the aisle; his parents that they’ll bury their son. Yet, he’s struggling, raging, snorting mad, stunningly joyful. “I have more to say,” he wrote in December. “I’m not going down without a fight.” The process of dying, it seems, has only made him more alive. Sasse models the kind of hope our culture desperately needs—a hope grounded in the certainty that the story does not end in the grave.

THE BOTTOM LINE

“The end of the story,” Sasse said on a recent podcast, “is that the new Adam came from heaven, laid down all of his prerogatives, and swept us up…” —his voice broke. “…raised us and seated us in heavenly places,” his cohost finished. If the West is to renew itself, it must once again believe that death is not the final word.

Grace Salvatore is Senior Editor of Media, Arts, and Culture at Restoring the West by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Follow her on X @grace_daley_s.