If not for my family–my own wife and children, first, but my extended family includes you, too–I'd have put a gun in my mouth and pulled the trigger ages ago.Actually, no: I'd have drawn a warm bath and opened, first, a bottle of Single Barrel Reserve, and then a vein or two, and gone out Seneca-style; which would be better than opening a bottle of "Indian Tonic" and going out senna pod-style, with my digestive tract disintegrated and a well-intentioned Nigerian doctor pumping my stomach full of red sand.
Even in my utmost despair, I want to believe my mother's backed-with-plenty-licks training from small not to "make a mess" would prevent me from splattering my grey matter, bone fragments and pulp tissue for someone else to clean up; but I still wouldn't swallow a poisonous chemical; unless I could name my poison as the Single Barrel, or perhaps the El Dorado 12-year-old, the two best rums being brewed a thousand miles in any direction from where you sit.
Of course, if I did shoot myself in the head–and there may be no difference between that and writing a newspaper column in Trinidad for 25 years–I wouldn't be around to collect the buff, but, in the same way we just didn't make noise in other people's homes and got force-fed laxatives to mark the end of the August holidays, my generation of West Indian just wouldn't be comfortable with guns. Clearly, we haven't moved with the times.