On January 2nd, Chester Nimitz, Jr. and his wife, Joan Nimitz, committed suicide in the continuing care retirement community where they resided. They overdosed on sleeping pills and thus brought to an end long lives filled with adventure.

The jointly planned and carefully executed suicide of the Nimitz spouses has deservedly received widespread attention across the country. This action by two people with a famous name raises issues of great spiritual importance.

The husband, Chester Nimitz, Jr., was 86 years old and his wife, Joan, 89. They had been afflicted in recent years with serious ailments that made them wary of a future filled with disability and dependence. With efficiency typical of them, they determined to end their own lives together rather than suffer further illness.

I could never blame anyone for doing what the Nimitzes did. It is easy to understand why they took this drastic action in their old age. Everyone can sympathize with their desire not to experience further illnesses and the progressive loss of control over their own bodies.

But what they did violates my own spiritual values. Their action goes against a life-long ingrained conviction of mine that human destiny is in the hands of God. Of course, some end-of-life choices remain ours to make but, in my view, suicide is not one of them.

Though I could imagine killing myself under extreme duress, doing so would go against my conscience. I would be betraying my instinct never to do violence to the life given me as gift.

In these judgments I freely admit being guided by the basic teachings of my own religious tradition. As a child I was taught that my life came from God who created freely out of love.

Being God’s creature meant to reverence my life and preserve it from harm. As the catechism says, “We are stewards, not owners, of the life God has entrusted to us. It is not ours to dispose of.”   

My community of faith finds another motive for the sacredness of human life in the redemptive work of Jesus. Through baptism, believers have taken on a new identity and share in the life of Christ.

“You are not your own, you have been bought at a great price,” St. Paul, one of this community’s most eloquent spokesman, affirms. This mystical identification with Christ is what it means to be a Christian at its deepest level.

My spiritual community’s covenant of love with God excludes suicide. Belonging to Christ gives believers a spiritual freedom that extends widely. Ideally it delivers us from the false gods of money, power, and reputation.

But this faith also brings with it certain constraints, one of them being that we do not have the power to determine when we shall live and when we shall die.

That does not mean needing my life artificially extended past any hope of worthwhile living. No one is obliged to prolong his or her life by so-called extraordinary means. It is perfectly acceptable to stop using breathing machines, for example, when patients can no longer benefit from them.

I realize that even some of those who share my tradition may not share my convictions about suicide. When I shared my views of the Nimitz case with some close friends last week, I was surprised to discover that some of them look with favor on what the Nimitzes did.

Though these friends place a high value on our religious tradition, they still would feel free to avert such situations as suffering years of Alzheimer’s or Lou Gehrig’s disease before dying. They also argue that maybe the Church will ultimately change its position on suicide as it did long ago on usury, and has since then on other issues.

Still I regard the suicide of the Nimitzes with deep misgivings. It strikes me as another form of rationalism that clashes with spirituality. Though I admit that some spiritually-minded people might kill themselves rather than face a future of suffering, I still consider their action as out of harmony with a spiritual view of the world.

Hope in God is the bedrock of this worldview, something that I hope will sustain me when my end draws near.

Richard Griffin