And as, to borrow from “The Sire of Sorrow,” Joni Mitchell’s musical take on the Book of Job, I find myself “all complaint,” I cast up, despite myself, several life lessons I hardly knew I knew, as the whale ignominiously cast Jonah upon the sands. One: don’t expect the struggle ever to stop. It merely takes new forms. Two: constant struggle will wear you down and wear you out, but intermittent struggle keeps you awake, productive, and alive. Three: suffering can lead us to empathy and compassion, to a deeper connection with the human race. As the narrator of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” says after the death of his daughter, contemplating his estranged brother, “My trouble made his real.” Four: art, whether it be literary, musical, or visual, can help us make sense of our lives and lend us a context in which to understand our struggles. Case in point, that compulsive list of allusions I just produced: Mary Chapin Carpenter, William Wordsworth, Dante, Beowulf, Lee Smith, Joni Mitchell, Job, and James Baldwin.

So, these small wisdoms aside, my path has led to a dark wood? Well, yes, this particularly bleak winter day at my desk, composing this talk, questioning my purpose, the worth of what I’ve lived and learned. But, well, no, not entirely. One of the great gifts of aging is this knowledge: that internal darkness, however deep and apparently endless, is not endless.

I survived long enough to learn that, and that knowledge has helped me survive a lot longer. I’d like to tell you now about someone who did not survive, a man I never met, and what I learned from his story. Then I’d like to tell you about the people and places that have given me light and hope even though—I am old enough to know myself, strong enough to be honest—my brain’s chemical constitution tends towards light and hope’s polar opposites.

A few years ago, my partner John and I visited the poet laureate of West Virginia, Irene McKinney, in her home near Belington, in Barbour County. A survivor herself, having recently endured a series of treatments for bone cancer, Irene was as full of vivacious intellectual energy as ever. Talk about a role model when it comes to dealing with adversity. It was January, so we stayed inside a lot, cooking, drinking wine, and talking, watching snow flurries whiten up the pastures. I was working on a new book then, Loving Mountains, Loving Men, a collection of memoir and poetry about being gay in Appalachia, and Irene, who’d kindly agreed to write a blurb for the book’s back cover, had read earlier versions of it. Reading about my life reminded Irene of a friend of hers, and she told me about him. I have no idea whether his family would appreciate his presence in this talk, so I’ll use a pseudonym and call him Jamie.

Jamie grew up in Barbour County. He used to play drums with Irene’s guitarist son; together they built Irene’s A-frame guest cabin on the edge of her property. He was a lot like me. He loved to make music, he loved to walk the woods. He was a great enthusiast of Native American culture, and he was devoted to his mountain roots. He was gay, and so his country-Catholic father rejected him. He suffered from great loneliness, for, as you might imagine, there’s not a lot of opportunity for gay romance in rural West Virginia, a loneliness I myself had known for long years before I was fortunate enough to meet John. Thanks to this isolation, these burdens, he was seriously conflicted, as many of us are, straight or gay. Something went wrong, in his heart or in his head. Jamie became seriously depressed. When he was thirty-three, during a visit to Wilmington, North Carolina, he disappeared. He was found drowned in the Atlantic Ocean, an apparent suicide. To use the language of this speakers’ series, he had lost his path.