Come As You Are: Five Years Later

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Come As You Are: Five Years Later is a soul-baring exploration of grief, love, and the terrifying beauty of opening your heart again after loss. Five years after the death of his husband Brian, Scott believed he had come to terms with impermanence. He had even begun to love again. But when new love stirred old fears—of loss, of vulnerability, of the illusion of control—he realized he hadn’t found equanimity. He’d been practicing indifference.

This intimate, honest memoir peels back the layers of what it means to grieve fully, to love bravely, and to meet fear without running. Drawing on decades of vipassanā practice, Scott writes with clarity and compassion about dating apps, anxiety, meditation, and the complex ways grief resurfaces—not just as sadness, but as resistance, longing, and fear.

With warmth, wisdom, and a touch of wry humor, Come As You Are: Five Years Later is not just a story of grief revisited—it's a companion for anyone learning to live, love, and begin again after heartbreak.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I read the advance reader copy of Come as You Are (Five Years Later)… and it undid me.

From the first chapter, I knew this book would stay with me. G. Scott Graham doesn’t just write...he reveals. Come As You Are (Five Years Later) is an intimate, lyrical journey through grief, healing, and the messy, sacred act of staying.

The writing is raw, tender, and fiercely honest. There’s a line that cracked me open: “I thought I was adapting. I thought I was adjusting. But really, I was disappearing.” Moments like this are everywhere in the book...quiet truths that whisper directly to the reader’s heart.

This memoir is not about answers. It’s about the questions we ask ourselves in the dark. It’s about the armor we build to survive and the terrifying beauty of taking it off. As a reader, I felt seen, held, and challenged.

What I love most is how the author holds space for paradox, joy and sorrow, solitude and longing, fear and freedom. Scott doesn’t shy away from complexity; he walks right into it and invites you to come along.

If you’ve ever lost someone, rebuilt yourself, or tried to love again...read this book.

It doesn’t just tell a story. It gives you one.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I read the advance reader copy of Come As You Are Five Years Later. While the theme of the book deals with finding love after the grief of losing a long-time spouse, it's really a book for everyone in or wanting to have a close loving relationship. This book is a valuable guide for navigating the uncertainties and second guessing that most people do try to drive a relationship. There is a prompt with exercises at the end to help you reframe your thoughts away from those self-sabotaging behaviors we sometimes feel when we are vulnerable.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Being human is messy. And if you are a human with an open heart, willing to love and be loved, there is always loss. G. Scott Graham's new book, "Come As You Are" is his most personal yet. While my own life experiences differ, I have the same human emotions, desires, fears, and longings. This book is a gem, and I highly recommend it - especially if you want to love and be loved. I laughed out loud at some of the Vipassana experiences, (Did the teacher forget to ring the bell?) and cried salty tears more than once. This is a beautiful book about staying open to the journey, not needing to know the end, and understanding that messiness and uncertainty is where the sweetness lies.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I was privileged to read an advance reader copy of Come As You Are: Five Years Later by G. Scott Graham. This book is more than just words on a page—it’s a living, breathing experience—a raw, personal journey of deep love, grief, and being present to the sacredness of life unfolding.

As part of a three-part series (so far), this installment offers a unique and intimate look into a love story. Graham writes with such honest vulnerability that I felt the messiness of life through heartache and hope.

What moved me the most was just that—the honesty of emotion. There is an awareness of grief and the ability to express joy—never forcing one to replace the other. In that balance, there’s an incredible gentleness and strength.

This isn’t a book that offers easy answers. Instead, it offers self-examination and presence. Although I haven't had similar experiences, I learned what "all-in" really means. I also related to points of introspection and tumultuous emotions with relationships—it isn't always clean and clear at every point. There is risk to loving again. I appreciated the space for my emotions and memories to surface and be seen.

If you’ve ever loved deeply or lost deeply—or both—this book will speak to you in unexpected and tender ways at least it did for me. I’m so grateful I had the chance to read it, and even more grateful that a book like this exists in the world.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ In G. Scott Grahams’ beautiful and vulnerable new work, Come As You Are, readers are invited to journey along with the author in his spiritual evolution through grief and self-discovery. Written with poetry-inspired cadence, the author’s story is told through the lens of his life since the untimely loss of a great love and invokes raw emotions while inspiring clarity. Using his own meditation practice as a touchstone, Scott explores how returning to the cushion anchors a person when lost in the sea of grief. Anyone who has ever lost a loved one will resonate with the stories of love, loss, longing, and moving forward with life. In telling his story, Scott invites us all to come as we are and rediscover the return to our own cushion.

Although grief is familiar to many, his story is far from conventional. With captivating intensity, he deftly relates feelings of anguish and deep grief following the loss of his husband, Brian, after thirty-one years. With his loss set against the background of the COVID pandemic, Scott dives head-first into those depths and reverberates the isolation felt during prolonged grieving. However, he does not rely solely on pandemic sequestration to highlight his predicament. Speaking to the separateness created out of fear of loving again, Scott admits the mental gymnastics used along the way with heart-wrenching honesty. Powerfully raw, he confesses his faults and endeavors for more authenticity within his life.

Just as the reader finds themselves along the ride into the depths, the author rockets them back to the surface, like a scuba diver surfacing emergently. As he ascends, the soaring hope catapults the reader through a rediscovery of new love. However, quick ascents have risks and, in true author fashion, Scott unapologetically hangs his emotional bends out for all to see. In this manner, he explores the various paths he has taken through denial of his own grief and blind spots and how they affect his new life, while tending his wounds with intense authenticity.

Scott’s rediscovery of love weaves into his story of true self-discovery. This unexpected event shakes him from his grief-invoked armoured detachment and reawakens his desire for true connection. Throughout his story, the reader feels the ancient human need for connection and the internal battles our quest for this connection produces. With humorous practicality (“I should have brought a toothbrush and one bag”), Scott addresses the illusions we conjure within ourselves to convince us we are safe in our “certainty”…until we are brought face-to-face with what we fear, the loss of that connection and the uncertainty that accompanies it. Scott explores how reawakened love can also revive the fear of losing it, in an all too human way.

Not satisfied with staying high on his mountaintop of tranquility and false equanimity, Scott admits the false armor he constructed to protect himself from future grief. He unpacks the baggage of a past life which reminds him all too often of his loss, and how it shapes his future with a new love. Told with stark honesty about his own healing through psychedelic practice, Scott shares with readers his experience of MDMA in healing his emotional wounds and how it helped to unburden him of deeply buried grief in order to move on and continue living.
If you’ve ever experienced the loss of a loved one, Come As You Are will resonate a deep chord within and remind you to return to yourself. It will strum the chord and pluck it in just the right ways to let you know you are not alone in your grief. The intuitive and emotional music evoked from reading Come As You Are will send you to the depths of grief and soaring back into hope. In the end, you will return to your own cushion with a renewed hope of life after death.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ This not a book about a flowery experience of "moving on" and not another research article about stages. David Kessler talks about not moving on from grief but rebuilding around it. This book embodies what it means to rebuild and grieve around a painful loss.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Having lost two people dear to me, I found G. Scott Graham's "Come As You Are: Meditation & Grief" to be a refreshingly honest departure from conventional grief literature. Graham writes from the raw experience of losing his husband of 30 years and navigating that loss during pandemic isolation. Rather than presenting grief as something to "get over" or a series of prescribed stages, he offers permission to experience grief exactly as it comes—messy, nonlinear, and ongoing.

What struck me most was Graham's integration of meditation practices with his grief journey. These aren't presented as quick fixes, but as grounding tools that create space to be present with pain rather than avoiding it. The book balances personal memoir—including unfiltered diary entries—with practical guidance, helping me recognize patterns in my own grief while providing new mental frameworks to process them.

I was unexpectedly moved by Graham's perspective that grief isn't something to "move on" from, but rather to integrate and carry forward. This subtle shift has added depth to my own "mental tree of conscious constructs" around loss. Instead of seeing grief as an obstacle to overcome, I now understand it as an experience that has expanded my capacity for understanding both love and loss. The book doesn't promise easy answers, but offers something more valuable: tools to keep showing up for your grief, exactly as you are.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ In Come As You Are: Five Years Later, G. Scott Graham delivers a candid and deeply human exploration of grief, healing, and the fragile courage it takes to love again after devastating loss. This memoir picks up five years after the death of his husband, Brian, with Graham believing he had reached a kind of emotional stability — only to discover that what he had cultivated was not equanimity, but a subtle, socially sanctioned indifference.

What sets this book apart from many grief memoirs is its focus not on the immediate aftermath of loss, but on the quieter, more complex terrain that follows: the return of hope, the risk of new love, and the emotional unraveling that can accompany what looks like “moving on.” When Graham unexpectedly falls in love again, he finds himself confronting not only the possibility of connection, but also the resurgence of fear, anxiety, and unresolved attachment. In this way, the book reads as both a love story and a psychological excavation — introspective without being indulgent, vulnerable without collapsing into sentimentality.

Graham’s decades-long meditation practice informs much of his emotional framework, but the book remains accessible even to readers unfamiliar with Buddhist concepts. He writes with clarity about ideas like equanimity, impermanence, and the “near enemy” — the ways we can mistake emotional withdrawal for inner peace. These insights are woven naturally into the narrative, offering moments of reflection without veering into self-help territory.

The book will likely resonate most with readers who have experienced deep personal loss or who are navigating second chapters of love later in life. It will also speak to anyone who has grappled with the dissonance between outer functionality and inner fragility. There is no tidy resolution offered here — no miracle ending, no spiritual bypass. Instead, Graham offers the reader something more valuable: an honest map of the terrain, and a reminder that healing is not about transcendence, but about choosing to stay open in the presence of risk.

Come As You Are: Five Years Later is an affecting, grounded, and emotionally intelligent work. It doesn’t aim to inspire so much as it invites the reader to be real — with themselves, their grief, and the full complexity of loving again. And in doing so, it achieves something quietly profound.