a remarkable book

Grace and Grit:
Spirituality and Healing in the Life and Death of Treya Killam Wilber

I finished this book over an hour ago, and my eyes still sting from crying. At one point E caught me sobbing with the book held open before me, trying to blow my nose, wipe my tears, and yet not stop reading. He silently lay down close beside me on the couch, and sweetly wrapped his arms around me.

Although you know from the subtitle how this love story is going to end, at the close, the circumstances around Treya's conscious death are still capable of surprising the reader, so I let myself surrender to the emotional waves as they washed over me. I felt like I was receiving a transmission from a high spiritual teacher, and I was a little overwhelmed, emotionally. But...a conscious death, without fear! I am in awe of their experience. As a dear friend of theirs says at the passing-over ceremony a few days later, "Treya taught us how to live, and she taught us how to die."

I've been afraid to read this. I could tell that E was a bit trepidatious when I became enthralled with it earlier this week. Yet I can be fearless. So what was keeping me from diving into this rich and nakedly honest, human story? Common cowardliness. Maybe I sensed that once I read it I would be called to respond with greater courage in the face of fear, illness and pain. Since the book reads as both a story about Ken and Treya's love and also as an introduction to the perennial philosophy, I feel like I've been enveloped in a sacred teaching all week.

What strikes me most is the story's intensely personal nature -- I mean, Ken publishes many of Treya's journal entries and her keen observations about her advancing cancer. We're privy to some hairy details. At the same time, it's the tale of every one of us. Falling madly in love, tasting human suffering, excruciating illness, and then getting torn from the paradise we've discovered. And finally, dissolving or being pulled, prepared or not, into the mystery of death.

And Treya's negotiations and discoveries about how to surf life's alternating patterns I find extraordinary, such as witnessing her fighting the cruel onslaught of the disease and simultaneously surrendering to a state of grace and acceptance, observing the simple dichotomies that make up life such as male and female, doing and being, day and night, as well coming to terms with what she views as her relentless search for meaning.

When I had finally finished, E looked tenderly at my swollen eyes and asked if I was glad I read it. It feels as if I've been given a great gift. I'm not as afraid (am I afraid at all?) of death. I'm more determined to deepen my spiritual practices, and to observe every moment, to love more. To really live every splendid moment in the kind of joy that Treya felt.