Dear Betty:

I hate you.

Love,

George

— Suicide note quoted in Marc Etkind, Or Not to Be: A Collection of Suicide Notes, 1997

From the agony I have been through for no reason whatever I can only come to the logical conclusion that if there is a god that he is not so good as is made out.

— A young clerk’s suicide note, quoted in Olive Anderson, Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England, 1987

Kids, if there are any errors in this letter, I did not proof it carefully.

— From the 1985 suicide note of Cleveland superintendent of schools Frederick Holliday, who shot himself in a high school stairwell on learning that the school board planned to oust him

In 1930, San Quentin death row inmate William Kogut removed one of the hollow steel legs from his cot, stuffed it with red pips torn from from several packs of playing cards, and soaked them with water. Then he plugged one end of the pipe with a broom handle, rested it on a kerosene heater, and held the open end against his head. The red ink contained enough nitrocellulose to cause an explosion that drove the card fragments into Kogut’s head, killing him.

His note to the warden said that he was punishing himself for the murder of Mayme Guthrie. “Do not blame my death on any one because I fixed everything myself,” he wrote. “I never give up as long as I am living and have a chance, but this is the end.”