Last night I saw a marvelous PBS show about the great American playwright Eugene O’Neill.  It was a spooky encounter for me.  O’Neill’s masterpiece, A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, has always hit very close to home.  If we change a few of the particulars, the play captures the essentials of my childhood.  We had no morphine addicts, just plenty of alcohol, but we were awash in guilt and blame and recrimination.  There was nothing in our lives quite so haunting as the death of a child, which infuses both the play and O’Neill’s autobiography, but there was a pervading gloom and regular explosions of the most hurtful emotions.  In that house I learned to wall off my feelings in self-preservation.

    When the TV show was over, I said to my wife: "The Chinese are a lot smarter than the Irish."  We both come out of Irish backgrounds and, while she does not share my passion of Chinese philosophy, she knew what I meant.

   The Tyrones, the family of A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, have no sense of letting go of their desires and expectations and fears.  Rather, they wallow in them.  O’Neill himself, although he found an extraordinarily creative outlet for his emotions, also could not personally get away from the maelstrom that was his family; he failed as a father, too.  The peculiarly Irish elements of the story are: the crisis of rejecting Catholicism but not being able to accept the realities of atheism; the supreme facility for the most damaging verbal thrust; and the substance abuse.   The Tyrones, and O’Neill, seem to require transcendent meaning, but they can never find it in their families.

    As I listened to the excerpts from the play, I couldn’t help but think what Chuang Tzu would do.  I could imagine him, sitting quietly in the corner of the living room as the Tyrones rage and cry and assault one another, laughing to himself every once and a while.  "Just let it go," he might say.  The death of the baby was no one’s fault, so it is no use for Mary to blame herself or Jamie.  Career achievements are utterly transient, so there is no reason for James to work himself into a lather over his perceived failings.   We are all going to die eventually, so why not just enjoy the simplicities of the moment.  Dwell in the ordinary.

    I thought, too, how Chuang Tzu has ultimately served me better than my Irish forebears.  With the death of Aidan, were I to follow along in the footsteps of my father and mother, I would be drinking myself sick while alternately blaming myself or Maureen.  It would be no end of pain and doom and gloom.  But I had enough of that in my first eighteen years; I do not want to recreate the poisonous context from which I fled.

    So, instead, I think about Chuang Tzu and others, who tell me that there is no blame here.  There is no guilt.  There is only the transformation of a young life, a return to Way ("ashes to ashes, dust to dust") that is inevitable and universal.  Best to let Aidan continue to live through me as I move through Way.  And keep those old Irish ghosts out of the house.