On the principle that anything is possible, I did a Google search. But there doesn’t seem to be a real-life model for Legacy Letters, the business imagined in Andrew Hinderaker’s play Suicide Incorporated, that helps would-be suicides craft that final statement that says it all. There is a “suicide note generator” on the bad-taste comedy site porkyjerky.com: you type in your name, click on a reason for killing yourself (“inferiority, destiny . . . McDonald’s”), and it spits out something stupid. There’s also a Legacy Letters Project that turns out to be a rather sweet effort to encourage older people to share their wisdom with kids. And of course there are sites where you can read farewell messages by people who’ve already done themselves in. The notes from regular folks tend to be petty, pro forma, confused, or outright crazy. But a few by accomplished artists made me wonder if the recipients might not be just a little bit proud to have inspired them. I was especially struck by Sara Teasdale’s valedictory poem to the lover who left her, which says that when she dies “I shall be more silent and cold hearted / Than you are now.”
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And yet I couldn’t shake the voice in my head asking nagging little questions like: Is Legacy Letters a legal enterprise? And doesn’t the business plan assume an awfully high degree of rational conduct—finding the service, paying for it, participating in a consultative process—from a market segment that’s lost the will to live? And what about the lawsuits when family members find out that Legacy abetted the death of a loved one? Given that the business is in its infancy and we only see one client, a guy named Norm, why is Scott hiring? How does Jason spend the 90 percent of his workday that doesn’t involve Norm? And so on and so on. The thing just seemed implausible.
