A Father Given 90 Days to Live Wants More Time to Raise His 14-Year-Old Son

When he was asked what he still wants to get done, Ben Sasse, the former Nebraska senator who led the University of Florida, did not talk about politics, books, or a legacy. He talked about his boy.

Sasse, who learned he had advanced pancreatic cancer that had spread, says he sleeps “15 or 16 hours a day” on heavy doses of morphine for tumors in and around his spine. Sasse says he is “in and out of the hospital every week,” and bored out of his mind.

In mid-December, doctors gave him 90 days to live. He entered a really aggressive clinical trial, and Sasse says, “We'll live a lot longer than 90 days,” though he does not know how many months that means. That uncertain extra time is what the rest of his story is about, and why he is willing to endure hospital treatment he describes as “kind of nasty” to get it.

He put the thought in a line he posted on January 9: “You can play a lot of basketball in the last 60 seconds.” By that he meant that the end of a game can still hold real play, and the end of a life can still hold real work and love.

For Sasse, that work is mostly fatherhood. His daughters are 24 and 22, and what he calls their wonderful providential surprise, their son, is only 14. When he asked himself why he really wanted to fight to get into a trial, his answer was duty, chiefly because his young son still needs a dad at home.

He needs a dad, as Sasse puts it, “to slap him upside the head a little bit longer,” to give him advice and wrestle through questions, and to help him recognize “that he's going to need to be a man earlier than those of us who were blessed to have a dad in our lives a lot longer did.” “I want to be a good dad for longer,” Sasse says.

He describes that wish with an old Puritan phrase, redeem the time. For him it means living with gratitude to God by trying to benefit your neighbor. He also says nothing we build lasts, but human souls do. He even renamed a forthcoming podcast “Not Dead Yet,” after the Monty Python joke, on Sasse's theory that “If you're not dead yet, you may as well redeem the time.”

He keeps working, talking, and writing when he has the energy. Whether he has 90 days or longer, he says, the good ways to use it are to hug his wife in the morning, to love his kids, and to reflect with them on the important questions.