Squid Wrestling
“Squid wrestling: all tentacles and no substance.” Sleep Talkin Man
As a dream worker, I find it fascinating to try to understand what dreams mean. Images that arise in sleep talk are little jewels of dreams, which can be explored in the same way as longer, more involved dreams. I discovered Sleep Talkin Man because all of a sudden, several people brought the blog to my attention…friends on Facebook, and other dream workers. When I saw the post quoted above, at first I just had a good laugh, which is a sure sign that there’s a nugget of truth in it. But then I began to wonder what that nugget of truth would be. After all, I have no plans to literally wrestle squid.
As I considered the symbol as a metaphor, the first thing that came to mind is that this is exactly what it’s like for me to wrestle with my grief. All tentacles and no substance. Since my last blog post, my mother-in-law decided she’d had enough of her multi-year fight against cancer, and died peacefully in her sleep. After losing my mother seven months earlier, the grief was familiar, yet different. I didn’t have the prolonged fog or sense of unreality, but I did find that I could sleep as long as I was allowed, including multi-hour naps during the day. At first, sadness mixed with relief that her suffering was over, but as the days wore on, the relief faded and the sadness took over.
Every little reminder, mostly unexpected, raises tears. Today, it was the bulky white envelope in the mailbox. Seen from the end, in the stack of other mail, it resembled the sort of envelope my mother-in-law would send, stuffed with photos and clippings and a cheerful note. Each of these reminders grips me in its tentacles and I have no choice but to live through the rise of emotion.
Yet there’s nothing of substance to grab onto. There’s no physical being to wrestle to the ground, no actual tentacle to peel off my skin. Instead, there’s just the acknowledgement that loving someone creates deep and lasting ties, and even when the other person is gone from this earth, the habits of those ties remain in our hearts and minds. People say that time will heal my grief, and they may be right. But I know, from watching my mom get teary when she spoke of her dad, decades after his death, that the tentacles never really let go.
February 4th, 2010 at 9:13 pm
Amen
February 6th, 2010 at 8:20 am
Thank you, Laura. Well said. Sometimes insubstantial is full of substance. LOVE, V
February 8th, 2010 at 8:09 pm
Time doesn’t cure the grief exactly, but in my experience as time goes by, the waves of grief are still there, but they become less frequent. At first, you feel like you’re drowning. Then there are hours when you’re happy, then maybe whole days, then maybe weeks and months. And now and then the grief comes back, on an anniversary, or when something triggers it like the envelope you mention. But it’s not all the time. And you’re right, the tentacles are still there, but I find that with time, sometimes those ties of love bring happiness instead of sorrow. Every time I “count my purse” I think of Mom and laugh.
Thanks for a very insightful post.
May 2nd, 2010 at 2:39 pm
A very beautiful and insightful commentary. Probably Emerson was wrestling with these types of issues — death — the loss of a loved one, etc. — when he wrote: “We sometimes see a change of expression in our companion, and say, his father, or his mother, comes to the windows of his eyes, and sometimes a remote relative.”