Kara Keough Bosworth revealed this weekend that her husband, Kyle Bosworth, has a very special tattoo in honor of their late son McCoy Casey.
In a tribute on Instagram on what would have been the baby's 5-month birthday, Kara shared a photo of Kyle's tattoo, which shows little McCoy's footprints. Memorial tattoos using ashes are created by adding a small amount of a loved one's ashes are added into ink and then injected into the skin during the normal tattoo process.
In the caption, Kara explained the meaning of the tattoo, writing, "your ashes are tattooed on his skin in the shape of your perfect feet."
"I can feel it coming every month, like a pressure system building before the storm that comes on the 6th," wrote Kara, who delivered McCoy on April 6. The baby "experienced shoulder dystocia and a compressed umbilical cord," she wrote previously on Instagram, and died after the home birth.
"The air is denser, my chest tighter," Kara continued in her post Sunday. "It’s like trudging uphill, looking back to see how far I’ve come just before I leap off the cliff back into the pool of sorrow. Compulsively, willingly? I look at your pictures, watch your videos, indulge myself in the thinking of you. It’s a painful ritual, this opening up of the box that I’ve lovingly curated. The box that I try to keep in the closet, instead of out in the open."
"Other days, I unpack that box late at night when laying in your daddy’s arms, where your ashes are tattooed on his skin in the shape of your perfect feet," she shared. "More of my tears have washed over your feet in the last 5 months than have fallen down my cheeks in the 31 years before you."
Kara, who is the daughter of Real Housewives of Orange County star Jeana Keough, described "opening the box" on the sixth of every month as "a brutal unwrapping of the healing cloth I’ve buried myself under."
"Yet every month on the 6th, I dutifully open it and confront the would-have-been’s of you," she continued. "You would have been 5 months old. You’d be looking like the marshmallow man in your sleep suit. You’d be chunking up, and fidgeting with my necklaces while nursing, pulling my hair with sweaty little grips. You’d be grabbing your fat feet, and attempting to sit up before nosediving into the floor. You’d be so proud of your new skills, and we’d startle you with our voices as they reach that ridiculous parental pitch cheering you on."
"We’d give you a lemon this month, watching your face scrunch up and your body shudder," Kara went on. "Instead, we scrunch up and shudder because of the lemons this life has given us. But don’t fret, my sweet boy. Your loss hasn’t soured us. You’ve sweetened us. Like salt on watermelon. Life after loss is a juxtaposition that only makes sense once you’ve tasted it. Because of our sadness, we seek joy. Because of our pain, we find pleasure so easily. Because of our past, we live in the present. We remember that we only have a finite, unknown time between our birth and our death. So we often ask ourselves, 'What will we do with this gift that is life?'"
"To my partners in pain: Don’t waste perfectly good grief, it can change your life for the better if you let it."
McCoy died shortly following his birth in April after experiencing “shoulder dystocia and a compressed umbilical cord” during the course of his birth.
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