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.
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.
Let me just say this right up front:
six months ago,
I genuinely thought I had my shit together.
Not in the “I’m thriving” kind of way.
I wasn’t skipping through life with a smile plastered on my face
or posting inspirational quotes on Instagram.
But I had a rhythm.
I had a way of being that felt… settled.
Balanced.
I had equanimity —
or at least that’s what I kept telling myself.
I had survived the unimaginable:
losing my husband, Brian,
after thirty-one years of partnership, friendship, shared mornings, inside jokes, dogs, heartbreaks, quiet dinners,
and all the ordinary magic that makes a life.
I had walked through hell.
And I seemed to have made it out alive.
-----
I had cried the tears.
I had sat on the cushion, day after day, cracked open and raw.
I had felt every inch of that grief,
like a slow avalanche pressing down on my chest.
And I kept showing up.
I kept breathing.
I learned how to live in a world without him.
That’s no small thing.
That kind of survival deserves a damn medal.
So yes — I thought I had equanimity.
And, to be fair, I did.
I do.
But it was equanimity around one layer of grief —
the kind that comes with absence.
The space where Brian used to be.
The echo in the house.
The empty chair at dinner.
That ache became familiar.
Something I could live with.
Something I could carry
without collapsing under its weight.
-----
But then Peter came along.
And suddenly, grief wasn’t a story I had lived through.
It wasn’t a chapter behind me.
It was right here again,
in the room —
but wearing a different outfit.
It came back,
not through absence this time,
but through presence.
Not through loss,
but through love.
And it completely wrecked me.
-----
Let me be clear:
I wasn’t looking for love again.
Honestly,
I didn’t think it was possible.
Not because I was closed off —
at least, not consciously —
but because I had already loved fully, deeply, and truly.
That felt like enough.
A whole lifetime’s worth of loving and being loved.
Why go back into the fire?
-----
Add to that the emotional carnage of dating apps,
the impersonality of swiping,
the emptiness of conversations that don’t go past the surface,
the way hookup culture both teases and numbs —
it all just felt… bleak.
So I told myself I was better off alone.
I had peace.
I had independence.
I had “done the work.”
It was a good story.
And I believed it.
Mostly.
-----
But what I was calling peace?
It was indifference.
Somewhere along the line,
I’d quietly, slowly built a wall around myself.
Not with bricks or barbed wire —
but with logic,
with stories,
with just enough activity to keep the loneliness at bay
and just enough stillness to convince myself
I was cool and imperturbable.
No one got in.
No one got close enough to threaten the delicate balance I’d created.
And because no one got in,
I wasn’t shaken.
I wasn’t hurt.
I thought that meant I was healed.
But what I’d actually created was distance.
-----
Then Peter kicked in the door.
He didn’t tiptoe in.
He didn’t gently ask to be let past my defenses.
He didn’t match my calm with more calm.
He came in like a force.
Unapologetically alive.
Disarming.
Present in a way that made me feel seen —
and terrified.
With him came something I hadn’t allowed myself to feel in a very long time:
hope.
And right behind hope?
Fear.
-----
Falling in love again didn’t erase my grief for Brian.
It didn’t diminish the life we built
or the way I still miss him
when a certain song plays
or the dog does something he would’ve found hilarious.
But what it did do
was crack me open in a way I hadn’t expected —
or maybe had stopped believing was even possible.
It exposed something I thought I had long since processed:
the fear of losing again.
The terror of having something that matters —
something fragile,
something beautiful,
something that could be taken.
Suddenly, everything felt at risk again.
And it was paralyzing.
-----
This wasn’t the composed grief I’d made peace with through integration.
This wasn’t the soft ache I’d learned to carry.
This was raw.
Unfiltered.
It hit like a wave I didn’t see coming —
dragging me into riptides of anxiety and old stories.
Suddenly, I was spiraling.
Holding too tight.
Trying to manage everything
so I wouldn’t feel that out-of-control foreboding fear.
I was clinging,
overthinking,
scanning for signs of loss
before anything had even been lost.
-----
That’s when I saw it clearly:
I hadn’t really been equanimous.
I’d just been safe.
I hadn’t healed
so much as I’d stopped letting anything or anyone
close enough to shake me.
And love — real love —
shakes you.
It rattles the cage you built to protect your heart.
It demands presence.
It messes up your routines
and asks for more than you thought you had left to give.
But it also brings you alive
in a way nothing else can.
-----
So this book?
This is the part people don’t talk about.
Not the first avalanche of grief.
Not the funeral
or the casseroles
or the awkward check-ins.
That’s part of it, sure.
But this is the part after that.
The part where the world thinks you’re “doing better” —
and you mostly are —
until something stirs the water
and grief resurfaces in a new form.
-----
This is the story of grief returning through love.
Of thinking you’ve done the work…
until your heart dares to open again
and suddenly you’re back in the fire —
not because something broke,
but because something beautiful started to bloom.
-----
It’s about realizing that healing isn’t a finish line.
That equanimity isn’t a fortress.
That being okay
doesn’t mean you're not still tender
in places you forgot existed.
It’s about the way joy and grief live side by side —
how the return of hope
can actually be more terrifying
than the finality of loss.
Because when something ends,
you mourn.
But when something begins again?
You risk.
-----
This is also about discovering — again —
that peace isn’t the absence of pain.
It’s the ability to stay
when pain arrives.
It’s about the discipline of staying human
and open
and vulnerable,
even when your nervous system is screaming for escape.
Even when your trauma history is whispering,
“Shut it all down.”
-----
This is what it looks like to come back to life.
Messily.
Unevenly.
With your heart in your hands
and no guarantees.
-----
And no — I don’t have a neat moral.
No mountaintop revelations.
No tidy wisdom to pass along in bullet points.
All I have is this:
I’m still here.
Still feeling.
Still afraid.
Still grieving.
Still choosing to love.
Still discovering
that being human — truly human —
is messier, harder,
and more exquisite
than anything I thought I’d figured out in the years since Brian died.
-----
And if you’re in the middle of your own beautiful mess —
if you’re grieving and loving,
opening and closing,
terrified and hopeful all at once —
I want you to know:
You’re not the only one.
I’m not writing this from a place of completion.
I’m not done.
Not fixed.
Not enlightened.
I’m writing from the middle of it all.
The place where fear and love hold hands.
The place where grief turns into something new.
The place where we choose,
again and again,
to stay open anyway.
Come As You Are: Five Years Later by G. Scott Graham is an emotional journey from love to loss and having the courage to love again. Graham’s prose is lyrical, raw, honest and utterly relatable. This book is part memoir and part practical tools founded in mindfulness, meditation and coaching.
This journey follows Scott, a man who has lost Brian, his spouse of 31 years. Scott had a “once-in-a-lifetime kind of love…Not the fairytale version. Not the ‘can’t eat, can’t sleep, love-at-first-sight' montage with swelling music…the real kind. The kind you build brick by brick over decades…The kind that’s messy and magnificent and unshakable.”
Resigned to a life alone, Scott confesses: “I had built a version of myself that could survive almost anything as long as I didn’t have to feel too much.” He describes having ‘Marie Kondo’d’ his emotional life to reduce vulnerability to something small, controlled, and contained.
But along came Peter, and suddenly his world was shaken to its very foundation. Brene’ Brown would call it ‘foreboding joy’—that is, when something wonderful and real shows up in your life, “instead of leaning into it, you start preparing for loss.”
Through Scott’s journey through grief and loss and finding the courage to open his heart again, he talks candidly about the emotional roller coaster of fear, attachment, and emotional triggers, to coming to a place of equanimity and showing up in life exactly as you are.
As a Positive Psychology & Mindfulness Coach and a Relationship Coach, I thought as I read: I wish the author would end each chapter with some actionable tools, or perhaps provide a guide at the end.
To my pleasant surprise, he did just that. In the Appendix, you’ll first find a summation of the myths about grief (e.g. that there’s a timeline on grief, that ‘moving on’ is a ‘thing,’ that there are concrete ‘stages,’ etc.), followed by some truths (e.g. making space for sorrow without apology, etc.).
G. Scott Graham also addresses six emotional knots, and how to gently untangle them, such as how to navigate: guilt about moving forward, comparing your past relationship to your present one, triggers, fear of another loss, the pressure to ‘move on,’ and holding space for joy and grief. He does so by providing meditation tools, journaling prompts, affirmations, and quiet reflections.
Graham also shares meditations stemming from Buddhist tradition, and how and when to use them. I was particularly intrigued with the grief-specific variation of the Metta meditation. Finally, he concludes with gentle reminders when grief returns (No, you’re not broken. You’re not replacing anyone. You are expanding, and more.).
I highly recommend this book for those who are grieving and those who want to be more supportive to others in grief. I know I have bookmarked many of the tools provided, and will be returning to this book as a resource, often.