My grandfather used to tell a lot of stories. He'd usually tell his stories during mid-afternoon, while the tropical rainstorms routinely rumbled across the heavens above our ex-miner's hometown of Taiping, Perak*.

He'd take advantage of the ominous boom of thunder and hail-like rain, telling scary old stories about the Japanese Army's cruel beheading of villagers and torture of Allied prisoners, the grim toil and trouble under the British Empire and the hardships during those early years of Independence. And all about the Commies, too.

He'd sit in his favourite rattan chair by the windowsill in the living room, peering out of it with a look of melancholy, and reach for his tobacco pouch. His precious rollies.

Like watching an opera of Wagnerian proportions, I'd sit there, rapt with attention, digesting every morsel of fact or fiction, while he continued unfurling the tobacco leaves, meticulously caught up in his own little drama of making cigarettes. I loved and adored the old man. After all, Grandpa was Discovery Channel.

Grandfather (Nana) died in 1994 when I was but a 15 year-old schoolboy. Not long after he had passed away, I suddenly decided to write something about him. A sorrowful poem on Grandpa, perhaps, to honour his memory. But it never happened, because at that time, I didn't believe that writing about it could've helped ease any sadness at all. And then I grew older.

1999 was a bad year; I lost two other people who were very close to me: Lucy and Rohan.

Lucy Ganner, a free-spirited Welsh lass and fellow backpacker, died of a heroin overdose somewhere in Thailand in early February. She had perhaps died like Mr. Daffy in The Beach, in some grotty backpacker's lodge, a fetid, gloomy place crawling with giant cockroaches and busboys with cheesy pseudo-American accents.

It was a hell of a shocker, no doubt, because barely months before we'd spent time together in the jungles of Borneo on a Raleigh International expedition, baking chapatti's, mixing concrete, digging trenches and playing Truth or Dare? into the wee hours of the morning.

It was surreal; losing a grandfather is something normal, perhaps. Losing a new-found friend was an entirely different ball game. It was crazy, and when I had just found out, I really couldn't muster any emotion other than sheer disbelief. In time, I felt grief, but it was a mind-numbing I-don't-understand-this kind of grief, a dull ache between the two hemispheres of my muddled brain.

And as if one fatality wasn't enough for 1999, Death visited another close friend, a person much closer to home.

Rohan Seri Harith Nair had been a brother to me. I was 19 at the time, and he was the closest person I had to a surrogate elder brother—a real world role model. A hardcore mountain climber/fitness freak/practical joker with absolutely no sense of remorse. In essence, a great guy.

And Rohan had always been a morning person. Early to rise, that was his motto. As morbid as it may seem now, that was when I first heard the news. Early in the morning…

Vig, an old friend, had called up, and in a hushed-up voice, calmly told me that Rohan had passed away.

(Haha, that's funny, but I'm late for my Statistics class, and my girlfriend is waiting to pick me up)

"No, Suff, I'm not fucking with you, Rohan's dead," Vig reiterated calmly over the phone.

Like being hit by a freight-train out of nowhere, I collapsed into a pile on the floor, and wanted to let the shock run me over, and fade away. But it didn't fade away. I had class to go to, remember?

But I don't remember what happened next, my memory remains blank 'til today.

Maybe I held back the tears as I went outside to look at the headlines on the newspapers, maybe I held back the tears as I walked, maybe even ran to meet my then girlfriend. Maybe I held back the tears until I had buried my face in her neck and then I cried and cried and cried. Until she gently whispered to me that it was OK to cry. The next thing I remember was that I didn't go into class at all that day.

Rohan died in a freak accident, on a mountain climbing trip. Rohan died because of a gas leak from a propane lamp, in his tent. He'd died after scaling the peak of Mount Korbu (7129 ft), peninsular Malaysia's second highest mountain, in negligible time. He'd gone totally Ed Visteurs on me—on all of us—and decided to climb and climb until he ran out of mountains, or until the mountains ran out of him.

His death marked an intimate downward spiral of epic proportions. I felt like I had sailed right off the edge of the world, into an abyss of desolation and emotional blankness; the pain was not only absolute, it also held me together, for a while.

But this time around, I wrote about it. Like I'm writing about it now. It didn't solve any great mysteries or corner any plaguing doubts; it didn't heal any anguish or stem any regrets. But it did something. It proved to be a dampener, of sorts.

I showed my essay to some close friends, people who had loved and admired Rohan as a brother, too. They found it cute. On the surface, they seemed to wince and squirm at the despair and disconsolate pain that I had weaved throughout my little obituary. Inside, who knows?

But we honour the dead in ways that sometimes only we can understand ourselves. Some people have breakdowns, some people bounce right back up, and some people just never get up when they fall.

Writing is but one way to ride it out. Try it. It helped me. It may even help you, sometime.

*Taiping is a former tin-mining colony in Perak, a northwestern state in peninsular Malaysia.

Copyright © 2002 Suffian Abdul Rahman. All Rights Reserved.

Suffian is a 22 year-old freelance writer based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He's been a J.R.R. Tolkien fan since way before December 19, 2001. Give him a buzz at peregrin@angelfire.com