Grace and Grit: Spirituality and Healing in the Life and
Death of Treya Killam Wilber [1991] tells the story of the years in which
Treya and Ken fought the aggressive, metastasizing cancer which kept recurring.
The emotional toll the disease took from both their lives is documented in the
book, which includes much of Treya’s personal journals and Ken’s commentary.
Treya’s journey, the integrity and courage with she lived, continues to
inspire. A few months before she died, her body riddled with tumors, her head
covered by a pink scarf, she spoke at a conference. You can see the video of
the speech here.
Treya was born Terry Killam in 1946 in south Texas. She
writes that she was a high achiever, but constantly retreating to her room to
read. She got an M.A. in English, but then veered off toward environmental
causes, teaching and skiing in Colorado. She spent three years at Findhorn, a
spiritual community in Scotland, leaving to help found a similar foundation in
Colorado: Windstar, outside of Aspen. She went back to school at California
Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, studying psychology and East/West
philosophies. Friends introduced her to Ken Wilber, a writer and theorist in
the new field of transpersonal psychology.
Once married, Treya and Ken bought a house in Incline
Village, but there, their partnership fell apart. Ken had given up his own work
to support Treya and became ill with a mysterious disease. Though intensively
investigating and practicing alternative and holistic treatments, Trey had a
recurrence of tumors, chemotherapy and then diabetes. Living between the hope
of being cured and having a child, and the brutal recurrences of cancer, they
both broke down.
The Wilbers moved back to the Bay Area, and then to Boulder,
where Treya was able to have nine months without recurrences. Her intensive
work led her to what she thought of as an inner shift, however. Treya had
always felt her issues revolved around the pressures of doing rather than just
being. She tried to find her way back to “the simple pleasure of being and
making, not knowing and doing. It feels like coming home!” She said,
“Immediately it came up for me. To stop trying to be a man. To stop calling
myself Terry. To become Treya.”
Both Treya and Ken Wilber found themselves in positions in
which people without cancer did not know how to react to them. Some “new age”
people at this time assumed that people created their own cancers. Treya helped
found a Cancer Support Community which didn’t punish people who didn’t get
better, but who were deeply involved in their lives and only incidentally in
their cancers. She wrote a paper on “What Kind of Help Really Helps,” which was
published in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. Ken published a
paper in the Journal on how it felt to be a support person, also very
difficult.
Treya and Ken went to Bonn, Germany, to try a very aggressive
chemotherapy, but it failed to stop tumor growth. They also tried an enzyme
therapy with inconclusive results. By this time, Treya believed her cancer
could not be arrested by anything. It had metastasized to her brain and lungs.
She continued with her intensive therapies, without using pain medication and
continued writing as honestly as possible in her journals. She did steroids and
eventually surgery to reduce the brain tumors and was on oxygen. In January,
1989, she decided to stop. She wrote one last entry in her journal, “It takes
grace, yes – and grit!”
Ken had always told Treya that he had been searching for her
for lifetimes, that if anything happened, he would find her again. “You
promise?” she asked him again and again. Ken promised. He carried her upstairs,
she lay down in bed and within two days, surrounded by friends and family, she
passed away.
