As a writer, there are times when I read something and think, ‘Wow, that’s good, this cat has chops.’ Very rarely do I read something that’s new, that I didn’t know was possible. Ben Sasse, he just wrote one of those.
The former Republican senator from Nebraska was informing the nation that he has stage four cancer and is going to die soon.
‘Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence,’ he write. ‘But I already had a death sentence before last week too — we all do.’
It may seem trivial, or even cruel to ponder Sasse’s written words when we know the pain he and his family must feel, but it is not trivial to me, and never has been in the history of man.
Shakespeare called death the undiscovered country, but Sasse preferred to focus on what we know, writing, ‘To be clear, optimism is great, and it’s absolutely necessary, but it’s insufficient. It’s not the kinda thing that holds up when you tell your daughters you’re not going to walk them down the aisle. Nor telling your mom and pops they’re gonna bury their son.’
‘Kinda,’ as a writer, this casual usage that my editors often change when I employ it is the embodiment of what Sasse has wrought here. His words make me think that beauty always portends tragedy, but that’s okay. To invoke a New Yorkism, it is what it is.
Sasse, who went from the Senate to serve as president of University of Florida until last year, goes on to say, ‘A well-lived life demands more reality — stiffer stuff. That’s why, during Advent, even while still walking in darkness, we shout our hope — often properly with a gravelly voice soldiering through tears’
Aside from a few modern references, Sasse’s letter to our nation would have been understood perfectly 2,500 years ago in Athens, where such writing of the examination of the human condition was born.
Sasse tells us that, ‘Remembering Isaiah’s prophecies of what’s to come doesn’t dull the pain of current sufferings. But it does put it in eternity’s perspective:
‘When we’ve been there 10,000 years…We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise.’
Maybe what stands out the most in this incredible piece of writing is that it is not performative at all, in an age in which everything is. In the law, a dying declaration holds special weight. In Sasse’s pen, it holds our hearts.
Much of our languages’ great work involves death, Dylan Thomas imploring his father in poetry: ‘Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
As I read his profound letter to us, I couldn’t help but see the image of Sasse in his running clothes, stooped on a stone wall at the capitol, chopping it up with Schumer and McCain. Just a regular guy, one of us.
Reading his words about his own mortality, I see now he is much more than that. I spend almost the whole time I’m awake reading, when I’m not writing. At 50, little surprises me. This did.
My mother died of damnable cancer when I was 24, her final request of me was to write and deliver her eulogy, and I’ll be honest the request felt too hard. But when she died, I had a job to do, and for two days I did nothing but write, it was her last gift, she knew me, and she got me through it.
I’m so grateful for Sasse’s words, and that at a time when everything is so ugly, he took the occasion of personal horror to buck us up. His great-great-grandchildren will know of it and feel rightful pride.
God bless Ben Sasse and his family, and may his profound and beautiful words echo down the centuries as the epitome of grace in a falling world.
As a writer, I want to say, thank you senator, I know right now it must seem completely insignificant, but there is a scribe in West Virginia today who will be forever changed by those words, and I’m grateful for it.
