Speaking during a recent podcast interview, former Republican Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse opened up on his terminal pancreatic cancer diagnosis and on how he hasn’t given up on living despite the fact that he has Stage 4 cancer that is almost certainly going to kill him sooner rather than later.
Such is what he said when speaking to Ross Douthat, the host of the New York Times’s Interesting Times podcast on Thursday, April 9, commenting on a diagnosis that the 54-year-old married father of three announced in a December 23, 2025, post on social media, one in which he explained that he’s gotten a “death sentence”. For reference, the diagnosis happens to 64,000 Americans annually, and has a five-year relative survival rate of about 3 percent.
Sasse said, announcing the diagnosis, “This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase: Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die. Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence. But I already had a death sentence before last week too — we all do.”
He added, later in the same post, “I’ll have more to say. I’m not going down without a fight. One sub-part of God’s grace is found in the jawdropping advances science has made the past few years in immunotherapy and more. Death and dying aren’t the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived. We’re zealously embracing a lot of gallows humor in our house, and I’ve pledged to do my part to run through the irreverent tape.”
In any case, speaking on the New York Times podcast, Sasse said, “I did not decide to die in public. I obviously ended up with a calling to die. In mid-December I got a three- to four-month life expectancy, and I’m at Day 99 or something since then, and I’m doing a heck of a lot better than I was doing at Christmas.”
Continuing, he noted what it is like to know you have a limited amount of time left, and how he thinks about trying to pass wisdom to his kids, saying, “But even at three to four months left to live, you have to redeem the time. There’s only so many bits of unsolicited advice I can give my children.”
Later on, Sasse noted that he had been training for a triathlon when he started feeling back pain, and so went to the doctor and got a full body scan that showed he had “five forms of cancer: lymphoma, vascular, lung cancer, bad liver cancer, and pancreatic, where it originated.”
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He added that the doctor came in and told him, “‘Here’s a hard fact: Ben Sasse’s torso is chock-full of tumors.’ I was like, ‘OK, you came in with the real stuff.’ So, I have pancreatic cancer — Stage 4, already metastasized. They told me right away on Day 1, ‘This is not operable, you’re way post-surgical.’”
Further, he commented on his Christian faith and how it relates to his diagnosis, saying, “I don’t know what the weaving together of the tapestry of full redemption should look like, but I know going through the period of suffering that [what] I’m going through is a benefit because it is a winnowing.”
Concluding later on, when asked if he is ready to die, Sasse said that he has to be ready to meet his Maker. “He says, ‘You can’t keep the children from me.’ And we’re told that we get to approach the Almighty, we get to approach the divine and call him, ‘Daddy,’ ‘Abba,’ ‘Father?’ That’s pretty glorious. And I know that that’s what I need,” Sasse said.
Watch Sasse here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video