On a March morning in 1989, Robert Shoots was found dead in his garage in Weir, Kan. He had run a tube from the tailpipe of his beloved old Chrysler to the front seat, where he sat with a bottle of Wild Turkey. He was 80.

His daughter wishes he had mentioned this plan when they spoke by phone the night before, because she didn’t get to say a satisfying goodbye. But she would not have tried to dissuade him from suicide.

Years earlier, he had told her of his intentions.

“It wasn’t a big surprise,” she said of his death. “I knew what he was going to do and how he was going to do it.” (Wary of harassment in her conservative upstate New York town, she has asked me to withhold her name.)

Mr. Shoots, a retired house painter, was happily remarried and enjoyed good health. He still went fishing and played golf, showing no signs of the depression or other mental illness that afflicts most people who take their own lives.