Goodbye, Cruel World!

Goodbye, cruel world,
I'm leaving you today.
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

— Pink Floyd, "Goodbye Cruel World"^note A song that, funnily enough, has nothing to do with suicide

The suicide note. The final explanation for why one is shuffling off this mortal coil, quitting the earthly sphere, leaping off to join the choir invisible. The composition of such a note - rife with anguish, despair, and turmoil - can take a while; this may, happily, lead to an Interrupted Suicide Just in Time. Maybe, instead of writing things down, the victim could leave behind a Video Will. It could even be part of the elaborate façade involved in Faking the Dead or covering up a murder. In a murder mystery, it's often found to be forged in some way by our local Amateur Sleuth. The lack of a suicide note will immediately and in all cases prompt law enforcement to suspect that the death is not a suicide even if suicide appears obvious; in this case, the real cause of death will usually be homicide, accident, or natural causes.

Not as much Truth in Television as some might assume. This trope has led many people to believe that every suicide victim leaves a note and conversely that if there isn't a note, it couldn't have been suicide. An approximate guess is that fewer than one-third of suicide victims in the United States leave notes, and the older the victim is the less likely he or she will leave a note. Whether this is because older people have outlived their families or because younger people have learned from this trope that they 'should' leave a note is unknown since it's tough to ask a victim of suicide. Younger victims seem more likely to leave a note if a celebrity has done so in the very recent past. In Japan, this may take the form of a zetsumei-shi, or death poem. It is traditional to compose one right before committing seppuku (so expect to see a lot of these in historical fiction).

Even so, fewer than half of young American suicide victims leave notes, and it's only a very small percentage of them who leave suicide videos, so don't expect the lack of a suicide note to send the cops out looking for a murderer in Real Life. Outside of the US (even in Canada and the UK), suicide notes are even less common.

Related to Prelude to Suicide.

As this is a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Mazinger Z: In episode 46 a woman left her baby son together with a suicide note on the Institute's doorstep, explaining that her husband had passed away and she had got ill and could not take care of their son anymore so she had left him in the only place on Japan where she thought that he would be safe before going to kill herself. After finding the note the characters hurried up to search for her around the grounds of the Institute.
• From Skyhigh - Kino-shita sends a note to each one of the Alpha Bitch snobs who bully her telling them that one of them is next because she will come back to kill.
• From Welcome to the NHK: Misaki spends most of the next-to-last episode talking to Satou about suicide notes, particularly about one famous suicide note where the writer complimented his parents' cooking. She leaves a suicide note of that form on her bed ("The New Year's grated yams were delicious. So to everybody, goodbye."), which is Satou's cue to start looking for her.
• The Death Note can control the circumstances of its victims' deaths, so Light, while testing the limits of this ability, kills several people, controlling them to write "suicide notes" that, combined, contain a secret message to taunt L: "Do you know gods of death love apples?"
• Lampshaded by Nathan Mahler in Blood+, who willingly allows Saya to "kill" him. He survived and became a news reporter, implying that only his loyalty to Diva died.
• Subverted in Classi9: Beethoven started writing suicide notes regularly because of his Sense Loss Sadness, but people who found out about his habit know he is much stronger than he looks and won't actually commit suicide. Beethoven himself says he sees the notes as diary entries more than anything else, and the cast uses the length of the notes as a way to measure how upset he is.
• Played with in Naruto. Uchiha Shisui "left a note behind" after his death, but the rest of the Uchiha didn't believe that such a symbol of its strength would actually kill himself. The others suspected Itachi of foul play since anyone with the Sharingan would be able to copy handwriting. Itachi later revealed to Sasuke that he actually did kill his best friend to get the Mangekyou. It turns out that Shisui actually did write the note. He had been on Itachi's side in the whole stopping-the-Uchiha-coup ordeal.
• One of these is used for The Reveal at the end of Golgo 13: The Professional. Leonard Dawson is after Duke Togo for the assassination of his son Robert. The ending has Robert Dawson's suicide note read out, in which he reveals he hired Golgo 13 to kill him, feeling he could never live up to his father's standards but not having the willpower to take his own life.

Comic Books

• In Batgirl (2000) Cassandra leaves behind an audio recording for Barbara to find before going to face Lady Shiva, and it's clearly framed as a suicide note as a result of her persistent death wish. She thanks Barbara for everything she's done for her and tells her how she's been like a mother to her, but ends up deleting the recording, settling for a shorter note telling Barbara not to blame Shiva for her death. Cassandra is killed easily by Shiva, but Shiva then resurrects her to give her a better fight. This experience with death helps Cassandra regain the will to live and she manages to defeat Shiva, though she ends up comatose for days after the fight. It is never stated if Barbara ever heard the recording.
• Batman: Black and White:
  • In "Fortunes", Batman and a private detective investigate a death scene in which a murder has been made to look like a suicide, complete with a videotaped suicide note in which the victim (a professional fortune teller) claims she has foreseen that she will be murdered "at the hands of a non-believer" and has chosen to kill herself first. The detective, who has already noted that the death wound can't have been self-inflicted, points out the oddity that the video apparently shows the victim shooting herself and yet somebody has taken the video out of the video camera, put it in the victim's VCR, and helpfully rewound it to the beginning of the message.
  • The ending of "To Beat The Bat" reveals the entire monologue was a posthumous suicide note to Batman by a Mook who recognized he was just a loser who wasted his life getting repeatedly clobbered by the Bat and jailed for a Gold Digger who only loved the stuff he stole for her. With nothing to live for and realizing he's probably going to get the death penalty after killing a security guard on a heist with the Joker, he slits his wrists so he'd bleed out before Batman found him and read his note, thereby finally beating Batman to the punch.
• Used in The Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson, often by animals. In one, two bears happen upon a stuffed bear, which has the words "Goodbye World" taped to itself ("My God! It's Larry! He stuffed himself!") Another one features a spiderweb which reads "Goodbye World" and shows a wee spider... hanging itself...from the bottom.
• A suicide note delivered over the internet is the impetus for the plot of Kimmie66.
• Judge Dredd: Judge Death, when he was a human boy named Sidney, once tortured one of his Law School teachers to death and made it look like a suicide by scribbling this on the chalkboard.
• Used word-for-word in the cover of an issue of She-Hulk in which Andy the Awesome Android, heartbroken that his self-awareness and love he felt for a fellow office employee was the side-effect of the magics of Starfox/Eros the Titan, went back to his creator to get his programming completely rebooted.

Fan Works

• Danganronpa: Komm Susser Tod: Mayu hangs herself in Chapter 3, leaving behind a suicide note for her best friend Nanae, who then accidentally killed her trying to perform CPR. During the resulting investigation, Reiji comes across the aforementioned suicide note.
• Evangelion 303: In the chapter 12 Asuka's depression and self-loathing hit rock-bottom and she decided to kill herself, leaving a goodbye note for Shinji. Shinji saves her life just before she manages to pull the trigger.
• Ghosts of Evangelion: After running away from Kyoto Asuka tells Shinji she does not blame him for what happened -and he should not blame himself- but she cannot take it anymore before disappearing again.
• HERZ: Shinji wrote one when he decided to kill himself seven years before the beginning of the story. Kurumi found it and Asuka still keeps it.
• The One I Love Is...: In chapter 10 Asuka feels she no longer has a reason to live after losing her ability to pilot Eva and after losing -or so she thinks- Shinji. So she wrote a goodbye note for Shinji and left, intending to kill herself.
• In Don't Breathe Too Deep Anna finds a suicide note that her sister Elsa wrote years ago and confronts her about it.
• Erasing The Past is about Anna finding a suicide letter that Elsa wrote prior to their parents' deaths.
• Words From Our Heart is a one-shot where Twilight Sparkle reads Trixie's suicide note at her funeral.
• Invisible: From the Desk of Princess Daisy is a Super Mario Bros fic where Daisy feels lonely and attempts suicide. She leaves behind a note, but she survives the attempt and ends up with a Happily Failed Suicide.
• #14 (MHA): Izuku is implied to have written a suicide note where he tells his mother he thinks his death will make things better for her and asks her not to blame Bakugou.
• In Gensokyo Diaries IV, having Resurrective Immortality, Eirin writes a hypothetical suicide note as her last entry, though, other than that, her diary entry was the suicide note. Unbeknownst to her, she would succeed in killing herself for good.

Film

• In Kind Hearts and Coronets, one of these is essential for clearing the protagonist of a murder (ironically, practically the only death in the movie that's not his fault). Of course, it's only after he's been cleared of the murder he didn't commit that he realises he's left behind a confession — intended to be published posthumously — of those he did.
• Lydia in Beetlejuice has a scene where she is writing her suicide note, including proofreading it. She finishes the note but is interrupted before she can kill herself.
• In the movie Shortbus, James has been making a video about himself and his boyfriend Jamie for the last six months that turns out to be a suicide note.
• In Batman Forever, the Riddler does one ("You'll find the handwriting matches his exactly, as does sentence structure and spelling.") for a guy he killed. It consists simply of:
  To: Whom It May Concern
  From: Fred Stickley
  RE: My Suicide
  GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD!
  Yours faithfully,
  Stickley
• A variation of this trope in The Royal Tenenbaums; after Richie attempts suicide via wristcutting, he tells his family he left them a suicide note. His brother, showing his usual tact, asks "Is it dark?" "'Course it's dark, it's a suicide note."
• Trail of the Pink Panther. Young Clouseau has turned on the gas and is writing out his suicide note when there's a power blackout. So he lights a candle to see what he's writing. Cue big kaboom.
• In his special Life Is Worth Losing, George Carlin gives an example of possibly the funniest suicide note ever:

  Hey guys, guess what!

  Keep on reading!

  How are you? I hope you are fine.

  I am not fine, as you can no doubt tell from me hanging here from the ceiling fixture.

  You are the ones who drove me to this. I was doing just fine until you fuckers came along.

  I hope you're happy now that I'm goddamn dead.

  Signed, the corpse in this room.

  P.S. Fuck you people!

• Brooks's letter to the other inmates in The Shawshank Redemption.
• J.D. and Veronica in Heathers forge these in faking the suicides of various popular high-school students.
• Voiced as "goodbye, blue world" by Brainy in The Smurfs when Gutsy kicks him off the window sill of the Winslows' apartment.
• In The Miracle Woman, John writes a suicide note, and since he's blind, it's written sideways and off the page.
• Discussed in Analyze This after a man is thrown from a penthouse right into a wedding below.
  Vitti: Hey, people get depressed. They jump, you know. It's a human tragedy. That ain't my fault.
  Sobel: Oh, now you're gonna tell me it was a suicide?
  Vitti: I think he left a note. Jelly, did they find that note?
  Jelly: No, but they will in a minute. (starts to write)
  Sobel: Oh, let me guess what it says! "LIFE IS BULLSHIT! I CAN'T FUCKING TAKE IT NO MORE! SIGNED, THE DEAD GUY!"
  Jelly: Hey, that's good, Doc!
• The Wages of Fear: Touchingly, Bernando's suicide note is to his mother, telling her he found a job and not to worry if he doesn't write for a while.
• In Blood Harvest, Mervo shows Jill a letter his mother wrote, describing her plan to commit suicide with her husband over the foreclosure of their farm.
• Cyberbully: Protagonist Taylor Hillridge posts a video uttering this threat after being bullied online and having her heart broken. After her best friend Samantha sees the video, she notifies Taylor's mother, Kris, about this, and she, in turn, notifies paramedics, all of whom hurry to the Hillridge residence to stop her before she kills herself. Just as Taylor is about to do so by downing a large amount of Tylenol, she is unable to get the cap off, allowing Samantha, Kris, her younger brother, Eric, and paramedics to stop her before she makes good on this threat.
  Taylor: I'm the real Taylor Hillridge. And I don't know why everyone hates me so much! But maybe I do, because now I hate me, too. I really don't see the reason for trying... or for talking... or for breathing. (sniffles) I'm just done. So that's it, I guess. Bye.
• The Goonies opens with a prison guard finding out that Jake Fratelli has hanged himself in his cell, complete with a suicide note. Subverted when the guard reads the note and discovers that Jake faked his death.
  Guard:(reading note) You schmuck. Did you really think I'd be stupid enough to kill mys...kill myself?
• In 28 Days Later when Jim, who Slept Through the Apocalypse and woke up 28 days later, goes to his home looking for his parents he finds them dead together on their bed, having committed suicide with pills and alcohol, and a rather sad note from them begging him not to wake up:
  With endless love, we left you sleeping. Now we're sleeping with you. Don't wake up.
• Heaven Knows What: At the beginning of the film, Harley asks if killing herself would make her cruel boyfriend forgive her for some unstated offense. He gives her a Blunt "Yes". She writes a suicide note explaining her feelings to him, but he tears it up when she gives it to him. She promptly sits down and starts writing another note, but he tears that up as well, goading her to actually follow through with her suicide this time.
• Mackintosh and T.J.: After killing Luke, Coley hangs himself from a windmill. He leaves a suicide note in his pocket that explains everything. Webster reads the note, which proves Mackintosh innocent of Luke's murder, and he and T.J. rush after the four men sent to find Mackintosh. They arrive just as the men are trying to drown him.
• In And Now For Something Completely Different, the Deadliest Joke in the World sketch amends the TV version noting that after Ernest Scribbler writes the joke and dies laughing from it, his mother sees it in his hand and percieves it to be a suicide note. Then she reads it.
• Thoren from Sunburn (1979) kills himself by crashing his car. Investigator Jake is delighted to find his suicide note, as it means the insurance company is off the hook and Jake receives a large payment.
• Wrong is Right. The king of a Middle Eastern country conveniently commits suicide just before he's about to give Weapons of Mass Destruction to a terrorist leader. He leaves a taped suicide note which is authenticated by experts as having been said by him, but it's later shown that the CIA assembled the tape from recordings of his radio speeches.

Literature

• In Jay Asher's 13 Reasons Why, Hannah leaves a series of voice recordings, to be mailed to the people who drove her to suicide.
• At the end of Berlin Memorandum, Quiller has tracked down the Nazi he wanted revenge on since seeing him execute concentration camp inmates during World War II. We don't see what happens, but afterwards, he reports to Mission Control, who asks if he wants smoke out (Spy Speak for a cover-up). Quiller replies that it isn't necessary, as "he left a suicide note."
• Isaac Asimov's "The Feeling of Power": Technician Aub leaves behind a suicide note to explain why he was Driven to Suicide.
  "When I began the study of what is now called graphitics, it was no more than a hobby. I saw no more in it than an interesting amusement, an exercise of mind.
  "When Project Number began, I thought that others were wiser than I; that graphitics might be put to practical use as a benefit to mankind, to aid in the production of really practical mass-transference devices perhaps. But now I see it is to be used only for death and destruction.
  "I cannot face the responsibility involved in having invented graphitics."
• I've Got You Under My Skin: Regina found her father's suicide note on his body and kept it hidden from the police and her mother, both because she didn't want to break her mother's heart more and later because the contents of the note gave Regina a strong motive for killing Betsy: Regina's father explained in the note he had had an affair with Betsy and she was the one persuaded him to invest everything he had in her husband's hedge fund, which he now deeply regrets after losing it all and realizing Betsy was always using him.
• Gothos in The Kharkanas Trilogy claims that the project he's currently writing is a suicide note. He's been at it for several centuries now and does not expect to be done any time soon. Other characters are quick to question the point behind writing a suicide note that will never actually end; Gothos cares not.
• Wind, in The Legendsong Saga left a note when he drowned himself in the river.
  My arrow flies into the night
  Seeking a target out of sight
  If nothing draws it to the light
  I fall to the Void, I drown”
  • Glynn is more than slightly disturbed by the fact that she alone actually understands what he is saying; her soul is also a 'seeking arrow'.
  • The final line was also Lanalor's last words before sacrificing himself to the Chaos Spirit
• Les Misérables has a subversion. Inspector Javert stands over the River Seine, obviously thinking about killing himself, then goes to the nearest station-house and sits down to write... a list of suggestions for the administration to improve the police service. He then returns to the Seine and jumps in.
• In Polar Star, Arkady Renko is investigating the suspicious death of a female sailor on a Soviet factory ship, to the increasing hostility of the crew who would rather he bury the matter as their shore leave has been cancelled. Eventually, someone produces a suicide note by the deceased. The note it turns out is genuine—one of several the victim wrote while depressed—but it was 'found' in a place that Renko had already searched. Renko goes along with it though, so the crew can get their shore leave and the killer will let his guard down.
• Tristan from Post-High School Reality Quest always expected to be the next Einstein or Steve Jobs. But in college, he finds himself struggling more than he expected. Then Merrill punches him in the chest, which due to his Marfan syndrome puts him in the hospital, causing him to miss so much school that he's guaranteed to fail at least two of his classes, which means the best grad schools won't want him. Thinking his future is over, he texts Buffy, telling her to bring all his friends over, and then hangs himself. His note says, "Thought I'd have one last reunion of the whole group. Haha. Thanks, Buffy - I knew you could get everyone to come together. And thanks, Merrill, for helping me realize I really can't be anything extraordinary. Saved me a lot of time and frustration."
• In Rubbernecker, Patrick comes home to find a letter from his mother Sarah in which she says that things have been 'very difficult' for her, tells him where to find her will, asks for his forgiveness, and tells him to take care of her cat Ollie. Confused, Patrick shows the letter to Weird Nick, who tells him it's a suicide note. Sarah has told Patrick that she once considered jumping off Penyfan, so Patrick and Weird Nick rush there to stop her.
• In A Series of Unfortunate Events, the Baudelaires find that the spelling errors in a suicide note are a secret code used by grammar addict Aunt Josephine, giving them her hiding place.
• At the start of Shadow of the Conqueror, Daylen leaves a suicide note revealing his identity as Dayless the Conqueror before he leaps off the edge of the world. He intends to return home and destroy the note after the attempt fails and he regains his youth, but is too late to stop a local farmer from sending it to the papers, forcing him to concoct a story about being Dayless the Conqueror's son for when word gets out of Dayless being alive, leaving everyone to think that Dayless's Bungled Suicide actually succeeded.
• In Carl Hiaasen's Skinny Dip, Charles Perrone writes a fake suicide note, intending to cover his tracks as he flees the country, but karma catches up with him first.
• In The Sorrows of Satan, Lady Sibyl commits suicide after being rejected by Lucio, who unbeknownst to her is really Satan. Before she drinks the poison, she writes a detailed note describing the influences that led her to become what she is. After she drinks the poison, she survives long enough to write about her visions of the hell that awaits her.
• An Andrew Vachss short story had a psychiatrist advise a child molester to write a letter to his victim saying that he regretted his actions and will never see him again, as it would look good in court. After the letter is written, the psychiatrist pushes him off a balcony.
• In the Asian Saga, Yabu is better known in the later books for the beautiful death poem he composed before committing seppuku towards the end of Shogun than he is for the reasons why his lord forced him to commit suicide in the first place (sadism and Chronic Backstabbing Disorder).
• In the second book of The Immortals, Lord Belden covertly commits treason against Tortall and is found out. Knowing the reach of the king, he refuses to try fleeing to Carthak and "bringing more disgrace to my name", as he writes in "sharp, decisive hand" before taking poison.

Live-Action TV

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • In the season 1 episode "I, Robot... You, Jane", the cyber-demon Moloch had a couple of servants in the high school's computer lab, Fritz and Dave. When Dave changed his mind about helping to kill Buffy, Moloch wrote out a fake suicide note for Dave on the computer and Fritz killed Dave.
  • In the season 3 episode "Earshot", Buffy got the "aspect of the demon" of telepathy and knew that someone was going to try to kill all the students by lunchtime, but not who. They mistook Jonathan's vague suicide note (which he'd sent in advance to the school newspaper) for a sign that he was the one, and he was in a tower with a rifle, so Buffy accidentally took the time to stop his suicide before stopping the actual would-be mass murderer.
• The Girl From Plainville: Conrad leaves a note for Michelle and another for his family. Michelle keeps asking Lynn (his mother) for her note, making Lynn uncomfortable.
• In a third season episode of Veronica Mars, Veronica is given a Criminology assignment of planning 'the perfect murder'. She suggests faking a suicide note from the victim, using a generic phrase such as "Goodbye cruel world", typed on a computer so the note can't be analysed. Shortly afterwards, the dean of the college is murdered in exactly this way.
• Lost: Locke's suicide note, which is something of a Clingy MacGuffin for Jack, reads, "Dear Jack, I wish you had believed me." Talk about a guilt trip.
• At the end of Season One of Soap Chester tries to write a suicide note when he decides to commit suicide (Played for Laughs mind) because Jessica is about to be arrested for Peter's murder and he's about to lose pretty much everything (money and home, etc.) but he couldn't figure out the correct spelling of "suicide" and guessed that everybody would get the picture when they found him dead over a piece of kitchen roll with writing on it (because he couldn't find any paper).
• A particularly strange one left by Lane Pryce in Mad Men. After cutting him down, Roger, Pete, and Don see an envelope on his desk addressed to the partners. They open it and find:
  Roger Sterling: A resignation letter. It's boilerplate.
• Played with in the Sherlock Series 2 finale. When Sherlock is blackmailed by Moriarty into jumping off a building to his death or his friends will be killed, he makes a final phone call to John Watson who is watching from the street below. Of course, he's actually planning on Faking the Dead.
  Sherlock: This phone call, it's um...it's my note. It's what people do, don't they? Leave a note.
  Watson: Leave a note when?
  Sherlock: Goodbye, John.
• Oz: After Beecher's wife on the outside commits suicide and leaves her body behind for their little children to find, he receives a letter that she sent in advance in which she spitefully blames him for her death.
• Reaper: The Devil leaves a fake one of these when he uses Psychic-Assisted Suicide on someone.
  Devil: I've got his suicide note upstairs. Quick question: Quoting Hamlet — too cliche?
  (glances at corpse)
  Devil: Nah, he'd totally do that.
• What/If has Anne Montgomery do this via voice memo in the season one finale. In her typical fashion, she doesn't explain why (although the viewers see), rather just prophesizes about life and death in their entirety. Of course, the end shows it was actually a Faking the Dead moment.
  Anne: Everything ends. This is the end.
• The Musketeers: At the end of the second season Marguerite, governess to the infant Dauphin, kills herself out of guilt for having betrayed the Queen and Aramis by helping to make their treasonous affair public. Before drinking poison she writes a note explaining how the Comte de Rochefort blackmailed her into everything. Unfortunately Rochefort is the one that finds her body and he immediately destroys the note.
• Friends: In season four Phoebe's Evil Twin Ursula reveals that their mother left a note before killing herself when the girls were teenagers. Apparently the note revealed that she wasn't actually their birth mother and told the girls where to find their biological mother, information Phoebe had only just found out for herself in the previous episode. When Phoebe asks if she can see it Ursula quickly scribbles out a fake note which Phoebe immediately sees through.
  Ursula: That's basically everything. I mean, except for the poem. [chuckles] You remember the poem, right?
  Phoebe: No!
  Ursula: [grabs fake note] Fine, I'll be right back.
• In the Dragnet episode "The Starlet," the titular runaway leaves a note that says simply "To whom it may concern" before she overdoses on reds. The note explains it all - she didn't think her death would concern anyone.
• Frasier: When Niles moves into a Lonely Bachelor Pad during his divorce from Maris he finds that all of the previous occupant's belongings are still there. He asks the landlord if the other man left a forwarding address they could send things to.
  Landlord: Uhhh, he left a note, but...(hangs his head) no. No address.
• In the final episode of Forever Knight, a psychiatrist friend of Natalie commits suicide, leaving a message addressed to Natalie not to make the same mistake that she did. This backfires as Natalie decides to force the issue with her Romantic Vampire Boy and dies when he loses control of his bloodlust.

Music

• Subverted by Elvis Costello's album Goodbye Cruel World While the album definitely features depression and loneliness as recurring themes, none of the songs actually explicitly deal with suicide. And there isn't a title track either. The cover does depict Elvis on a cliff and possibly about to jump off.
• blink-182's "Adam's Song" is written from the perspective of a boy who's writing his suicide letter, only to happily change his mind in the last verse.
• The last song on the second side of the first tape of Pink Floyd's The Wall is "Goodbye Cruel World", which - while not a suicide note - is a final message from the main character to the world before cutting all his emotional ties and going behind his self-created Wall.
  • A Call-Back happens in a later song ("Waiting for the Worms"), where the protagonist says that he is irredeemable while hallucinating that he is a Neo-Nazi leader.
  • A somewhat straighter example is the title track of their following album The Final Cut, which sounds like a suicide note, and ends with the protagonist about to slash his wrists, when the phone rings, causing him to lose his nerve.
• Averted by a much older song, "Goodbye Cruel World" by James Darren. In that song, the protagonist joins the circus rather than killing himself after "a mean, fickle woman" abandons him. (He puts clown makeup on his face so he won't be identified.)
• Jonathan Coulton's song "Blue Sunny Day" is a musical version about this by a vampire.
• Five Finger Death Punch's music video for "The Bleeding" has a young woman hang herself at the end of the video with her ex-boyfriend discovering her suicide note.
• The Narrative Poem The Singer responds to the traditional suicide note phrasing with "The world was cruel. We wondered why he felt the need to say goodbye."
• A decent number of The Smiths and later, Morrissey songs read as excellent suicide notes.
• "Videotape" by Radiohead.
  • Also "No Surprises".
• "A Quitter" by Rasputina. The title has a double meaning in French, which phonetically translates to "has left."
• "Suicide Note Pt. 1 & Pt. 2" by Pantera are both songs about a guy writing his suicide letter.
• 'Stan' from Eminem has someone try to record one of these in anger.
• The lyrics to Billy Joel's "Tomorrow is Today" are actually based on his own suicide note from when he tried to kill himself by drinking furniture polish in 1970.
• Juliana Hatfield's "Swan Song" has a suicide note that reads "Dear Jack. I hate you. Love Diane". Apparently taken verbatim from a real note she read about, with the names changed as a darkly funny Shout-Out.
• "Goodbye Everything" by Mind Bomb.
• While suicidal undertones are common of Tendon Levey's work, albums released towards the end of 2009 (primarily I Recant, The Rifles in Mind Recoil and Bot of Big God, Bomb of His Whirs) are far more blatant in that they were actually intended to function as his suicide note(s).
• "A Song For" by Townes Van Zandt is based on his own (failed) suicide note.

Theatre

• Romeo and Juliet: Romeo sends a letter to his father confessing his secret marriage to Juliet and revealing his intent to commit suicide at her tomb. This letter, together with Friar Laurence's testimony, reveals the whole truth to everyone in the final scene.
• The Odd Couple mentions that Felix sent his wife a suicide telegram when she broke up with him.
• All My Sons ends with Chris reading to his father a letter written by his MIA brother Larry, which confirms that he was, in fact, Driven to Suicide by his father's denial of guilt.
• A play (whose name, unfortunately, escapes me) had an old lady murdering her long-time colleague. First, they played a game where they guessed and wrote down the next line of a poem the other quoted, inadvertently writing a rather lyrical 'suicide note'.

Video Games

• ANNIE: Last Hope have a particularly gut-wrenching Tear Jerker of a moment, when you're trying to locate your friend, the Struggling Single Father Mike, and his young daughter Jessica. You locate Mike's corpse hanging from the trees, and Jessica buried nearby, and discover from Mike's notes that Jessica was infected by the zombie virus forcing him to pull an Offing the Offspring before killing himself. The recovered note is one hell of a Gut Punch:
  Jessica, she doesn't know who I am anymore.
  She's not calling me dad again.
  Even she's turning into a monster, she's still my Jessica.
  I will protect my daughter.
  She bit me, though. What a naughty kid...
  The world is turning red and I start to forget who I am.
  Before I'm losing it, I decide to... end her misery... my... daughter...
  But I'll be with you soon, my poor Jessica...
• In Escape from Monkey Island, you can tell Guybrush to jump off a cliff. His response is to walk to the edge of the cliff and say "Goodbye cruel adventure game! ...Eh, forget it."
• The stock phrase appears as one of the messages in Team Fortress 2 when a player causes their own death with no prompting by jumping into a pit, switching classes while outside spawn, or using the "kill" or "explode" console command.
• This is written on pretty much every death note when you die in The Binding of Isaac.
• Subverted in Yandere Simulator. A girl can be found dead from falling from a great height, and her shoes and a suicide note are found on the roof. Seems straightforward, no? Except the main character, Yandere-chan, is a, well, Yandere, and, if her language skills are high enough, can push a rival off the roof and forge a suicide note to throw suspicion off her.
• At the end of Starcraft I: Brood War, Admiral DuGalle writes a farewell letter to his wife detailing what lead to the UED's defeat and what really happened to Stukov, and ends the letter by asking her to tell their children that he loves them and that he died in defense of their future before wishing "Au Revoir". He then loads a gun and points it to his head with the screen fading to black as he finally pulls the trigger.

Visual Novels

• In Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Justice For All's fourth case, a good portion of one suspect's motivation revolves around the suicide note of Celeste Inpax. It turns out that she worked for years as a manager in order to get close to the only man who could have found and stolen the missing suicide note. Over the course of the case, Phoenix ends up finding it. It turns out to be an elaborate forgery. Celeste Inpax either never left a note or it was replaced with a different note.
  • It's also brought up a couple of times that Miles Edgeworth left behind a note saying "Prosecutor Miles Edgeworth chooses death" before he disappeared. The final case reveals he only went abroad on a soul-searching trip.
• In Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc , Sakura Ogami's murder is revealed to in fact be a suicide, after which her friend pulls out the note she found, explaining how Sakura had been driven to despair by the way her only friends were fighting amongst themselves and hating her for her position as Monokuma's ex-mole, even though she'd rebelled against him. Turns out that note was a forgery, and her real note was a much more tender affair explaining how she hoped her death would fulfill her obligations and strike the first blow against the mastermind.

Web Animation

• Played for Black Comedy in one ASDF Movie installment: a man puts a gun to his head and sadly says "Goodbye world." Cut to a sentient planet Earth happily saying goodbye only to get cut off by a gunshot as it exclaims "Oh no! That's not what I thought he meant by that at all!"
• Stupid Kids: A newspaper reads Jigglypuff commited suicide and a left a note reading "Jigglypuff" in És mind nekem tapsol (And they all clap for me).

Webcomics

• The Adventurous Scarlet Carolus and the Machine of Eternal Summer: Tibor writes a suicide letter before trying to commit suicide by hanging.
• Mare Internum begins with the protagonist's suicide, complete with note. Then the note flops over, delaying his suicide long enough for him to be interrupted.
• In Cyanide and Happiness, Matt created his last comic in which Blueshirt decided to write a suicide note, goes to space and hangs himself in said space.
  • This strip is when a woman hanged herself, leaving a note that says "I'm fine".
  • Too hardcore for this world.
  • This kid wrote a suicide note with poor grammar.
  • This strip right here.

Western Animation

• Played for Laughs in Futurama; Farnsworth while recording his sort-of suicide note video, as he's about to be taken away by the "Sunset Squad" to a place where the elderly go to die:
  Farnsworth: (on holo-recorder) I'm sure you're all very upset, especially Bender.
  Bender: Well, life goes on. Except for you!
  Farnsworth: I'm sure that Bender has just made some cutting remark, but he doesn't know I taped over his soap operas to record this message.
  Bender: (furiously) YOU BASTARD!
  • Before being taken away, he also finds time to play with the phrase itself:
  Farnsworth: Goodbye, cruel world! Goodbye, cruel lamp! Goodbye, cruel velvet drapes with the cute little curtain-pull cords, cruel though they may be, I... (Sunset Squad robot gives up waiting and knocks him out)
  • Bender has a checklist form at the end of his "Plea For Attention" notes:
    [_]I Am Committing Suicide
    [_]I Am Getting a Tattoo
    [x]I Am Running Away
    [x]And This Time I Mean It
  • The Beast With a Billion Backs has him writing a suicide note with a quill pen (“In lieu of flowers, please beat yourselves in the face with rusty chains”) and pinning it directly to Zoidberg.
• Drawn Together episode "Gay Bash": After Xandir had to face the truth that he is homosexual (with the result that his girlfriend, the princess who he is perpetually forced to rescue from the clutches of his various arch-enemies, tells him to get lost) he tries to commit suicide, by dramatically yelling "Goodbye, cruel world!" and stabbing himself with his sword. Unfortunately, as a video game character, he is entitled to a lot of extra lives, which he has to "wear down" first before he can die. So he spends the entire night killing himself (and resurrecting mere seconds later, with the appropriate sound effect, minus one life) and growing progressively more bored and less enthusiastic about the whole thing, while the rest of the characters are vainly trying to catch some sleep. Who knew suicide could be such a chore?
• Homer Simpson attempting to jump off a bridge in an episode of The Simpsons:
  Homer: Goodbye, cruel world.
  (truck drives past)
  Homer: And goodbye, Cruller World.
  Driver: Bye, Homer.
  • In another episode, the townspeople are attempting to break the world record for "largest human pyramid", only for them to collapse into a giant rolling ball when Jimbo and Kearney realise their hands are touching. The ball's progress ends up interrupting a random character's suicide attempt.
  "Goodbye, cruel world!" (lands on the ball) "Hello, ironic twist!"
  • The Itchy and Scratchy cartoon in “Radio Bart” has Scratchy find a suicide note of his roommate, Itchy, with the exact phrase, “Goodbye, cruel world.” Scratchy jumps in a well to stop what he thinks is a suicide attempt in progress ... but realizes too late that Itchy never intended to kill himself ... only the poor feline.
• The Looney Tunes short Cheese Chasers, from 1951, features Hubie and Bertie unable to think of anything else to do in life after downing a mother-load of cheese, so they decide to let themselves be eaten by a cat, leaving the trope before doing so (with a double-meaning PS attached: "We've lived a full life"). But the eagerness to get eaten scares Claude the Cat to the point that he can't eat mice anymore, and unable to perform his main reason for existing as a cat, he leaves the trope (with a PS that went, literally, "No PS") and proceeds to go draw a bulldog's wrath.
• The reason that Aelita attempted to shut down the Supercomputer in Code Lyoko Season 2 finale, "The Key."
• Stumpy the squirrel from Kaeloo often says this before attempting suicide.
• Pixie, Dixie and Mr. Jinks: In "Ghost With the Most," Jinks thinks he killed Dixie acter clobbering him with a fireplace shovel (he reallly didn't—Dixie was playing possum). Dixie plays his own ghost to haunt Jinks, but when Jinks gets wise, he leaves a goodbye note indicating his own demise then pretends to be his own ghost to haunt Pixie and Dixie.

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