The Pain I Choose: Grief + Tattoos

I always thought I’d be the last person on the face of the earth to get a tattoo… Seriously, pain you intentionally choose for yourself? What’s the point!? And for 29 years, I was right. It only took death to change my mind.

Three years ago almost to the day I’m writing this, my mom was hospitalized and diagnosed with cancer. Though the cancer had already spread, she defeated the odds stacked against her and outlived many doctors’ predictions. However, the three years following have been a hellish blur. As close to hell as I ever hope to get.

Helplessly watching her suffer from treatment and fade a little more every day was a level of pain I didn’t know existed, or that it was possible to live through—a type of excruciating pain I can’t begin to put into adequate words. As her body shut down, I watched as she became far more dead than alive in the days or even weeks before she actually passed on.

Knowing that this grief would be lasting, I chose to get a tattoo representing her role in my life and the loss of her. I wouldn’t have considered this three years ago, but then again, I’m no longer the same person I was before this either. In the face of all of the pain the last three years have contained, a permanent tattoo seemed like a simple and temporary form of pain. A type of pain I would choose to undergo, rather than have unwillingly inflicted upon me by the tragedy that life contains.

When it came time to get the tattoo, it was almost therapeutic in a way—the pain a tangible yet woefully inadequate physical expression of the mental agony grief has brought about.

A pain I expected, asked for, and had control over the experience of. A pain that birthed the emotional anguish into the physical, leaving a permanent scar on the outside of what I’ve gone through on the inside.

Yes, I chose this pain and no, I didn’t choose the pain of my mom’s death. If it were up to me, she would have lived decades longer to see my wedding, play with the grandchildren she so longed for, and go through the process of being an empty nester. But, despite this, there is another type of pain I do choose in addition to the tattoo I designed in remembrance of her: the pain of remembering and loving her, even in her absence. 

Remembering is a pain far deeper than any physical wound. It’s a searing, burning agony that cuts to the core upon each memory of the loved one who has been lost. Each mental glimpse of their face, each imagined tone of their voice inflicts heartache. If I’m completely honest, I still have a hard time looking at pictures of my mom. Remembering the happy times, before the sickness. Accepting that she’s no longer here with me.

Yet, I choose that pain anyway. I choose to acknowledge the role she played in my life, the love we shared, and the innumerable moments she was there for me in ways no one else ever could or will be. I choose to love everything she was to me and continue to love those still here in my life in her honor. Because in closing my heart off to her, I’d be slowly closing my heart off to the type of love she showed me was possible, starving myself moment by moment of a vital ingredient to life itself.

Grief, in some form, is a sadly inescapable aspect of love on this earth.

To love someone is to inevitably become weighed down by a crushing load of sadness when you experience the loss of their existence. The two are inextricably mixed—a universal combination experienced at some point by all who have ever cared for another. Yet, despite the difficulty, I choose to love, regardless of the threat of grief such love inescapably involves.

I won’t feel this way every day. There may be seasons when I can’t focus on her image or recall the silly and serious memories for fear of unraveling at a less-than-ideal time. But I will always return to embracing what she brought into my life, grief and all. Much like the tattoo she inspired, it’s a pain I choose.

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