By Brittany Keeperman
Karen Marcus, 40, a blogger in Virginia said she had been thinking about getting a tattoo even before deciding on a design. Her father was very ill, and she planned on getting a memorial tattoo after he died.
“My father hates tattoos, especially on women,” Marcus said
“It was a big joke with him and I. ... 'Once you’re dead, Daddy, you’re gonna get a dead daddy tattoo on me,'” she added.
What Marcus didn’t expect was that her husband, Steve DeRose, would die before her father. DeRose died very suddenly, due to heart problems, according to Marcus.
“It was time to start getting that stuff checked out again,” Marcus said.
“I was constantly afraid that something would happen to him and well, you know the fallacy of denial. ... It wasn’t going to happen to him, but it did. He had a heart attack one day and he died,”
Following her husband's death, Marcus began contemplating ideas for her tattoo. DeRose loved to play the guitar, she said, so initially she wanted a tattoo of his first guitar.
“It would go from my lower neck to my hips,” Marcus said. “I’m rather glad I didn’t do that because I’d imagine that’d be quite painful,” she added.
Eventually, Marcus came up with the design that would ultimately be tattooed across her left wrist. A simple “I love you, Steve” in her husband’s handwriting. Marcus said she had saved all the cards and letters DeRose had given to her, and needed a way to remind herself of his love for her.
“I was spending so much time feeling so much guilt about how I didn’t save him or how we should have done more,” Marcus said.
“I needed something physically to remind me that he loved me,” she added.
Marcus went one night to a tattoo shop she said she always drove by.
“If I’d really thought about it I would have looked around a little bit more,” Marcus said, “But there was just a day that I went ‘today’s the day,’”
Marcus said the process was a little nerve-wracking, particularly because her father had recently died.
“I knew I was supposed to be walking in there to get the daddy tattoo with my husband next to me,” Marcus said.
“Instead, I’m walking in with one of my best girlfriends, getting the husband tattoo because I can’t even contemplate getting the daddy tattoo,” she added.
In a way, the tattoo helped the grieving process, Marcus said.
“What I found after my husband died was that everything hurt me,” Marcus said.
“It got really problematic when I was around other people because I didn’t want to be crying all the time. ..."
"Sometimes it’s hard to look down and see it and know he’s not here but other times I can look down at it and go ‘you know, the world may be throwing everything at me, but he always loved me and I survived it,’” she added.
Marcus is now engaged, and said that she didn’t think to tell her now-fiancé about her memorial tattoo before the first date.
She had made it clear from early on that she was a widow and would never stop loving her first husband.
“If you have a problem with that, if you're going to feel like you’re competing with a dead man, we can just be friends because I'm cool with that,” Marcus said she told him.
“He’s never had a problem with the tattoo or the fact that I’m still in love with my first husband, for which I’m really lucky,” Marcus said.
You can read more about Karen Marcus on her blog, lifeaftersteve.blogspot.com
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