Dispatches from the present
I’m waiting for Ben to die, and I’m getting a little annoyed with how long he’s taking. Last December he announced a diagnosis of stage four pancreatic cancer, which meant tumors had metastasized to his lungs, his liver and his vascular and lymphatic systems. The cancer was inoperable and the verdict terminal—his doctors ballparked three to four months left to live.
I saw him in April, near the end of the timeline. He certainly looked like he was dying. His body could no longer grow skin where it should and so he bled where he shouldn’t. He wore khaki pants, a checkered long-sleeve shirt and a red Nebraska Huskers hat—but there was no hiding that hideous face. He looked like a victim of acid burns. His nose, particularly, was grotesque; crusty and maroon; I kept imagining a fleshly leech had latched on and could fall off at any instant. He joked that recently a pharmacist had pulled him aside to inquire, “Did they do something electrical to you?” It wasn’t funny but I laughed morosely; allowing Ben his gallows humor seemed the least I could do.
Things are going better than anyone expected, though. Ben’s been zapping himself nonstop with radiation and other experimental therapies. His pain has declined by 80 percent since he began treatment because the tumors have shrunk and no longer press against his spinal column, a victory well worth the constant waves of nausea. Ben bores quickly of talking about his suffering—“enough whining”—nor does he dwell on the possibility of surviving his cancer. Still, I can’t help but perk up when he hedges just the tiniest bit, claiming his tumors are “probably just not something you can ever catch up on.” Probably.
Ben says he isn’t scared to die. “To live is Christ; to die is gain,” he soberly informs me. Just a few years ago I would’ve considered this an admirable display of bluster—rage against the dying of the light—but, ultimately, either false bravery or self-deception. I’m no longer so sure. For my first-year seminar at college, I chose to take “The Journey Within,” a class partly responsible for my transition from a New Atheist determinist to someone more metaphysically inclined toward believing in things like souls. One through line from that class was the complete lack of death anxiety amongst the thinkers we read. Socrates: “The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.” Jesus: “In My Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you.” The Buddha: “My life is impermanent; for me, death only is permanent. I must certainly die; my life ends in death.” Ivan Ilyich: “He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. ‘Where is it? What death?’ There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death there was light.” Ben’s prayers fit right in: “To whom shall I go? You have the words of eternal life.”
I’ve been praying also, in my own way. Devising scenarios in my head where Ben doesn’t die, I mean: miraculous breakthroughs in pancreatic-cancer treatment, the stunning reveal of an incorrect diagnosis, Ezra Klein’s star pills invented and shipped out tomorrow. It’s all hubris.
Lately, my thoughts of Ben come fringed with irritation. Perhaps it’s displaced anger at myself for not having the grace to look away. You see, I’m not actually friends with Ben; I’ve never spoken with him, never seen him besides on a screen. Before his podcast interview with Ross Douthat popped onto my YouTube feed, I knew about Ben Sasse’s life only in its fuzziest outline: conservative senator from the Midwest, UF president who seemed a little too chummy with McKinsey. But then, forming a parasocial attachment to a stranger dying on the internet is quite a common experience for people my age. Sometimes you only glimpse their final moments. In fifth grade, ISIS chopped off the head of a teacher’s son at my elementary school and posted a video for all the world to see. Last year, I watched a bullet rip through Charlie Kirk’s neck. Other online killings are a slower, more sadistic process. Clavicular, smashing his face into place with a hammer and abusing drugs until people watching his stream will one day witness him die. The whole genre of internet celebrities known as “lolcows”—online misfits who exist to be bullied and laughed at, whose audiences gleefully goad on the cows’ increasingly depraved and self-destructive behavior.
Dying online is a horrific fate: trapped inside the bowels of the internet, condemned to slosh around as a meme or a video clip for eternity. Unlike all those other figures, however, Ben is choosing to die in public. “My life is for itself and not a spectacle”—yes, but what about your death? Instead of hunkering down with his family, instead of traveling the world, Ben is “redeeming the time” he has left by modeling how to die. He is spending his final days teaching me how to reckon with my mortality through the example of his own. If Ben is wrong and death is vast nothingness—an endless no—it’s even more selfless that in the twilight of his life he’s devoted himself to one final yes.
Yet when I saw Ben recently, his face no longer bleeding, I heard he might live another six months, and a part of me hoped he would not. For a moment, I wished I could have watched Ben die when I was younger, back when I didn’t want to be alive. I used to imagine my death in a romantic and vaguely ridiculous way, never quite moving past the illusion that I would go on existing after I was gone. Perhaps Ben would have helped, punctured the grandiosity of my delusions. But now I want to live, and Ben is overstaying his welcome. Once or twice a week, I remember that he’s alive and frantically google his name to make sure I didn’t miss the news of his passing. After, everything seems off-kilter. All the people going about their day-to-day lives, completing one mundane task after another, meanwhile Ben’s walking alone through the valley of the shadow of death. I feel like stopping every person I see, shaking them by the shoulders. Don’t you understand, I want to growl, don’t you get it: “You pass through the vale of tears one time and then there will be no more tears.”