It was an accident. Alcohol and drugs — a bad mix.

Scott Jared Monat had a full academic scholarship to the University of Miami. While studying abroad in Singapore in March 2009, something went wrong with the brilliant 20-year-old neuroscience major.

He died.

I grew up with Monat. He was in my closest circle of friends. He lived in the neighborhood next to mine and would ride over on his bicycle. He didn’t have to work to ace organic chemistry or advanced physics. Genius came naturally to him.

What didn’t come naturally to him was his ability to stop: when to stop defying his parents, professors, friends or his body. It was known Monat liked to have a good time. It wasn’t unwarranted to worry about his partying behavior.

But Monat finally learned when his heart stopped ticking.

The grief that accompanied Monat’s death affected not just individual people, but whole communities.

His Facebook page still receives messages every week from friends in various cities and countries.

He had a birthday pass in December. Friends write, “Happy birthday!” as if Monat will read it. Friends write as if he is simply away on vacation.

And that’s how I’ve dealt with his sudden absence from my life — by pretending he is just away on a long vacation, still in Singapore studying or at college in Florida. Sometimes my friends and I still refer to him in the present tense.

College life is rarely conducive to grieving, according to “Living with Loss,” by researchers at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Campus life is geared toward academic and social activities, leaving little room to make it through the grieving process.

National Students of AMF (Ailing Mothers and Fathers) Support Network, a not-for-profit organization that helps students coping with death on college campuses, stresses that there is too much academic pressure to deal with grief properly.

The phrase “college is supposed to be the best four years of your life” can be confusing for grieving young adults.

Perhaps the grieving process in college occurs at a much slower pace.

Most students don’t have the time to focus on their emotions without falling significantly behind in schoolwork.

Perhaps the sting is just too fresh in our young lives to master the process of grief. It doesn’t help that Monat was too brilliant, too friendly and too young to die.

As for me, I still cannot accept Monat’s demise.

Any time it crosses my mind, I try to think about something else. I push the thought of his death as far out of my head as I can — until I find myself troubled when    something reminds me of him, such as a song on the radio or a picture of us together.

When moments like this occur, my guard comes down and I feel as though I’m going through the initial shock once again. Then the feeling subsides, my guard goes back up and I go on with my life and school.

College students may deal with grief differently than other members of the community. Whether it’s due to preoccupation with school or bypassing the commonly held belief that people go through a five-stage grief process (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance) — it remains largely up to the individual experiencing the grief.

But one thing remains certain.

Monat left such a positive influence that he is not easily forgotten — or even so much accepted sometimes as, well, dead.

— Sarah Saltzman is a senior from Roswell majoring in magazines and anthropology