The Secret Language of Symbols: Dead Duck

It’s been a hard year. My husband has had several operations, culminating in heart failure and two weeks in the cardiac care ward.

He is recovering well now, and perhaps that is what finally did it. The adrenaline wore off and, for the first time in months, I felt able to breathe again. Unfortunately, without the adrenaline to keep me upright, I crashed.

This weekend, after a relatively minor setback to our plans — it is often the pebbles underfoot that hurt more than the rocks — I told him how low I had been feeling. I had kept it from him because he had been so ill, and the last thing I wanted was to add to his worries.

Some part of me knew it would pass. I am naturally an optimist. Nevertheless, I felt flattened and rather defeated. I found myself rummaging through the archives of my life, looking back at various choices and disappointments and wondering, “What happened?”

My husband was upset to hear me speak like that, and I was upset to have upset him. I knew the feeling was temporary, but there is a part of me that sometimes longs to stop trying quite so hard and simply give in to defeat.

Something in the Night

At around three o’clock the following morning, I woke to go to the bathroom. I really should keep a record of what happens in the middle of the night, because there is often something.

As I climbed back into bed, I glanced out of the bedroom window. There, on the garden path, was a dead duck.

I went downstairs to investigate. The top of its bill was curved upwards, as though it had struck something at speed. Perhaps it had flown into the house or hit the ground and broken its neck. I couldn’t be sure.

What I did know was that I felt an immediate sense of recognition and pity.

The duck seemed to embody a part of me I knew very well: something exhausted, spent and no longer able to keep itself afloat.

Ducks appear so calm as they glide across the water, while beneath the surface their feet paddle furiously. That was what I recognised: the part of me that had kept going, kept working, kept fighting, making telephone calls, writing complaints and trying to hold everything together.

And now, as dawn broke, it lay still on the path.

I recognised this as synchronicity. Synchronicity is Jung’s term for a meaningful coincidence: two or more events that are not obviously connected, yet seem linked by the meaning they hold for the person experiencing them.

It might be a dream, a thought, a fear or a question that is suddenly echoed by something in the outer world. Jung did not suggest that such moments proved the existence of fate. Rather, he saw them as occasions when the inner and outer worlds briefly align, leaving us with the unmistakable feeling that something significant has occurred.

What Ducks Symbolise

A dead duck is not difficult to read as a symbol. Something has ended or lost its life: a hope, a plan, a relationship or perhaps an old part of ourselves.

Ducks belong to water, land and air. They can swim, walk and fly, moving between different worlds with apparent ease. The dead duck, by contrast, could no longer move anywhere. It seemed, to me, to speak of exhaustion and the loss of the ability to adapt, recover and carry on.

There was vulnerability in it, too. It looked small and helpless, lying there. Whatever had happened had happened quickly. One moment it had presumably been flying; the next, it was on the path.

And, of course, there is the phrase itself. Something described as a “dead duck” is hopeless, finished, beyond saving. That fitted rather too neatly with the defeatism I had admitted to only a few hours earlier.

But perhaps the duck did not signify the death of hope. Perhaps it marked the end of a particular way of surviving.

The part of me that had paddled furiously beneath the surface had done its job. It had carried me through fear, anger, hospitals, operations and uncertainty.

Perhaps something in the psyche was saying: you cannot go on like this.

That way of staying afloat is over now.