Grace and Grit

Spirituality and Healing in the Life and Death of Treya Killam Wilber

Year: 1991 · Format: Book

Description

Memoir of Wilber's marriage to Treya Killam Wilber, her five-year illness with breast cancer, and her death, interleaving her journals with his own reflections. Wilber's most personal and, for many readers, most affecting book.

In-Depth Overview

Unlike Wilber's theoretical books, Grace and Grit is built from two interleaved first-person voices: Wilber's own narrative prose, and long, largely unedited excerpts from Treya Killam Wilber's private journals. The book opens with their wedding in 1983 and, within days, her diagnosis with breast cancer — and follows the five years that followed: rounds of surgery and chemotherapy alongside macrobiotic diets and alternative therapies, the practical and emotional strain of caregiving, and what Treya came to call simply "the work" — a personal philosophy, developed largely in her journals, of holding equanimity and acceptance of what's true alongside an active will to live and fight the disease, rather than treating those two stances as contradictory. The book ends with her death in January 1989 and Wilber's account of grieving her.

There is very little AQAL apparatus here — no quadrants, no developmental charts. What carries the book is the direct application of contemplative practice (both had serious meditation backgrounds) to the concrete, unglamorous work of illness, caregiving, and loss, narrated with more vulnerability than Wilber allows himself elsewhere. It is consistently the book most often named by readers — including readers otherwise unmoved by the theoretical work — as their favorite or most affecting, and is a reasonable entry point for someone who wants to understand Wilber as a person rather than start with the theory.

Notes

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