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United States Senate, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Former U.S. Senator Ben Sasse received a diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer last December. In an interview this year with 60 Minutes, interviewer Scott Pelley asked him why he was spending his remaining time doing interviews. Sasse laughed and said he assumed Pelley needed to fill some time.
Ben Sasse is a man choosing to die well, and in a culture that increasingly mistakes giving up on life for dignity, what Sasse is doing is quite revolutionary.
He won’t see his fourteen-year-old son grow up. He won’t walk his daughters down the aisle. And he knows all of this. Yet, he is spending his final days warning against the illusion that more consumption can make us happy. He is speaking honestly about what politics cannot provide. And he is bearing witness to what it looks like to face death with the Christian faith alive and well. “God has a plan,” Sasse said. “There are no maverick molecules.”
Across Europe, Canada, and a growing number of American states, advocates of what is now called medical assistance in dying (MAiD) market their cause under the banner of “death with dignity.” But buried in that phrase is a telling assumption: that there is no such thing as dying with dignity. It assumes that suffering has no meaning, and once comfort and pleasure are no longer available, life holds nothing worth preserving.
Let’s be clear — that’s not a medical position. That is a worldview that flows directly from a materialist, Marxist worldview of the universe that seems human life as an accident at beginning, usefulness to society in the middle, and death as an escape.
The Christian view is entirely different and absolutely correct. Christ’s death and resurrection transformed death itself! Dying with purpose and courage, even in pain, is not weakness — it is a witness. As Dr. James wood put it in a recent article in World Magazine, “in a culture that kills to avoid hardship and hides death to avoid reckoning, a man dying well on a public platform is a quietly radical act.”
People often speak highly of a “life well lived,” and the same should be said of a life well ended. Ben Sasse is giving the nation a gift in making such a compelling argument for the dignity and meaning of life. We would do well to receive it.
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