STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Former Senator Ben Sasse has terminal cancer. The Nebraska Republican was diagnosed at the age of 53. And with time running short, Sasse decided to act on a long-deferred idea to start a podcast with his friend, the journalist Chris Stirewalt. They set the tone in the opening episode as they discussed possible titles.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "NOT DEAD YET")
BEN SASSE: "I'd Rather Die Than Do A Podcast," which was pretty good.
CHRIS STIREWALT: (Laughter).
SASSE: My wife's was "Dead Man Talking."
STIREWALT: Yeah (laughter).
SASSE: We have settled on Monty Python's "Not Dead Yet."
STIREWALT: "Not Dead Yet."
SASSE: Because we don't know how many episodes we're going to get.
INSKEEP: We reached Ben Sasse at a Houston hospital where he's being treated.
I will normally tell people I'll be brief because I know their time is short. I think that is probably true in this case.
SASSE: (Laughter).
INSKEEP: But what is your diagnosis?
SASSE: So I have metastasized Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Around Halloween, I started having all this back pain, and I was just pretty sure that I had pulled a bunch of abdominal muscles. And we did some full-body scans on December 14, and my docs called me back in and were beating around the bush. And I said, please be blunt with me. I want some hard fact. Give me a truth. And they said, all right, Ben Sasse's torso is chock-full of tumors.
INSKEEP: Now, it sounds like your odds are very low. You're nevertheless going through treatment. Is that right?
SASSE: Well, pancreatic cancer is one of the most fatal, but I am on a really interesting clinical trial that is shrinking tumor volume pretty rapidly. And so what was originally a three- or four-month life expectancy, I was told there's a 30% chance you could live the better part of a year, which sounded a lot better than three or four months. So I think, yeah, it's fair to say I'm a dead man walking, but in a way, we all are. And so it's a question of how we redeem that time.
INSKEEP: How are you thinking about the time you have left?
SASSE: How do you live a life of gratitude to God? By trying to love your neighbor and especially those that are most proximate to you. So I am blessed to have Melissa, my wife of 31 years. And our daughters are 24 and 22, and our son just turned 14, and he feels like he needs a dad for a little while longer. So I want to knock him upside the head and wrestle with him and tell him how much I love him and tell him stuff I wish I had done differently in my life. And I want to do a little bit of thinking, reading, writing and talking.
INSKEEP: What are you telling your kids that you wish you'd done differently in life?
SASSE: I think we all live on three time horizons. Daily, at the end of your workday and as the sun is setting, can you say that you did meaningful work that day and can you break bread with people you love? No. 2 is kind of a planning horizon. What decisions should you make over the next 30 days that'll pay off over the next 30 years? And then an eternal souls kind of time horizon. And all three of them matter. But one of the silliest things is to allow the planning horizon to crowd out the other two, and I think many times I did that. I think in my 20s and 30s, I spent way too many nights per month on the road and had too few family dinners and too many nights in airports. But I had been repenting to my family for five or six years about some of my workaholism in the past, so this is not some deathbed conversion. But I'm, in a much more intentional way, reflecting on that with them now.
INSKEEP: I want people to know, as is clear from this podcast, that you're approaching this moment with humor. And let's just listen to a little bit of this conversation.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "NOT DEAD YET")
SASSE: The hard part for the postproduction staff is how often I vomit while we record.
STIREWALT: Yes. Prior to beginning this recording, I said that I've had a lot of people who I've interviewed who have wanted to throw up while I was talking to them, but never this frequency and never with this kind of enthusiasm.
SASSE: And this one's not because of you, which is fresh for you.
INSKEEP: (Laughter) I'd heard that once already. I'm laughing again.
SASSE: We decided to go ahead and embrace some of the humor of the fact that I need to run from the room a lot. I don't want to throw up, but if you throw up, you kind of want to check a box of getting a laugh out of it. But I need to laugh at death because death is terrible, but death doesn't get the final word. I think laughing at the suffering is a way to make it communal, but it's also a way to tell a bigger truth.
INSKEEP: I think you're heading to your next appointment now. Is that right?
SASSE: I am speaking to you from MD Anderson Hospital in Houston, one of the greatest places to try to wrestle with the nastiness that I'm struggling through right now. And we have an amazing team here, and you've been kind to fit me in between bloodlettings.
INSKEEP: All right. Well, good luck to you, whatever that means in this context. Ben Sasse, it's been a pleasure knowing you these past 10 years or so, and I'm glad to talk to you again. Hope we get to talk again.
SASSE: Thanks, Steve. I'd love to do that again. And thank you for the work you do, my friend.
(SOUNDBITE OF OF TWO MINDS' "TRANSITION 001: DEPARTURE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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