While attending the funeral service for my tattoo artist, I cried for my mom.
I am generally not weepy—even at funerals. I didn’t cry when my daughter took her first steps or spoke her first word. I didn’t even cry when they placed her tiny, slimy body next to my face. Probably because, behind the curtain stretched across my torso, I could feel the pressure of thick layers of skin, muscle and fat tugging as the surgeon stitched my split open stomach back together. On this occasion, though, I shocked myself by crying. I tried to gain composure. I worried my tears would be mistaken as fake. I knew the weight of this sadness must appear a little out of proportion with my relationship to this now deceased person, but I did love Dale. He was an amazing person. Someone I had formed a relationship with as he had been tattooing my body since I was eighteen years old.
Dale knew so many versions of myself. The me straight out of high school, my head full of anger and angst. The undergraduate version of me, who worked at a theater slinging popcorn, dated a lazy guy from Ohio whose only job was to wrestle for the college we both attended and make up for his freshman year where he filed for academic bankruptcy. Finally, the version of myself that I feel is closest to who I still am, which is the one where I entered my final year of undergrad, met my future husband, and decided to teach and pursue writing.
The last tattoo Dale placed on my body was a pair of strawberries with the phrase, “I wish you craved like I do.” I got the tattoo just after my mom died. Two of the positive memories I have of my mom center around strawberries. One where she told me that she always craved strawberries when she was pregnant with me and had said that it was the reason I had been born with red, strawberry shaped birthmark on my ribs. The birthmark shrank as I grew and is now no bigger than a pencil eraser. The second, that my mom had loved that 90s song by Deanna Carter, “Strawberry Wine.” Anytime it came on the country music station, she would turn my dad’s huge, old stereo up as loud as it would go and just belt out those lyrics. She couldn’t hold a tune, but she didn’t care, and me and my brother loved every second of it.
I was seven weeks pregnant when I got that tattoo. I didn’t explain to Dale what the phrase meant, but somehow, he knew I was honoring someone. Another customer came by to see what Dale was working on. When he read the phrase, “I wish you craved like I did” he smirked and asked me what exactly it was that I craved, his tone heavy with unnecessary inuendo. Dale didn’t even look up from my arm, he just kept the tattoo gun buzzing, the tiny needles hammered with smooth precision across the back of my arm as he replied, “Man, this is about craving life. Get out of my booth while I work on Becky. This is her business not yours.”
Looking back, I often wandered into Dale’s booth after I lost someone, or I felt like I was losing control of the small world around me. Dale tattooed me after my first engagement failed, after my Uncle Ronnie, my bonus parent, passed away, and again when my mom passed away. He has also tattooed me in many moments of personal celebration. I will never forget the first time my husband and I both walked into Dale’s shop together. He had been tattooing each of us for several years before we met one another. The look of pure joy and excitement on his face when he saw that two of his customers had managed to find each other is something I hope remains forever imprinted on my heart.
I guess it felt strange to be there surrounded by hundreds of the people Dale had impacted in his forty-three years of life. It felt strange because I had this tugging in my chest that reminded me that Dale was the only person who had physically comforted me when my mother had passed. No one hugged me, not my dad or my husband. No one sent me flowers, cards, or an embroidered blanket. I didn’t expect any of that, but Dale was there. He put the memory of my mom to my skin, and as tiny drops of blood dripped like the silent tears I had wept in secret, he wiped them away. Me and my mom had never had a “normal” relationship, and I hadn’t even seen the woman in twelve years, but I still struggled with her death. I guess it was the realization that we would never have a chance to fix it.
There was also this guilt swelling inside of me. The closer I got to the front of the visitation line, the more it seemed to swell. I started fanning myself with the visitation pamphlet, waving the piece of cardstock with Dale’s toothy grin on it so fast that he became a blue-brown blur. I felt heat rising in my cheeks and a painful throb in my chest. I felt guilty because I never travelled to say my goodbyes to my mom. I had made the excuse that it would have been impossible to make the trip to Arizona. We were still at the height of the Covid pandemic, having only just recently been permitted to go back to work in person, so instead, I had communicated the arrangements with my stepsister, sent her some money to split the cost of mom’s cremation and called it a done deal. It felt like the right thing to do at the time. Honestly, I even felt somewhat proud of myself for doing that much. A small part of me had reasoned that I was in my own right to have simply not bothered with any of it. She hadn’t been a large part of my life. She had certainly never been a “mother.” It took me becoming a mother to realize that maybe she had done more for me than I had given her credit for.
I made it through the line, managed to mutter condolences to Dale’s wife and sister, but when I saw his daughters, I crumbled in ways I had not expected to. I was flooded with a range of wild emotion: guilt, grief, love, and jealousy. They had been able to give their parent something I hadn’t been able to, but also something I had chosen not to. I ached for them as a mother, I ached for them as a daughter, and a small part of me ached to be them. Their grief would be accepted, encouraged, supported, and healthy. Their loss described as unimaginable—for me and anyone else they encountered. My own grief for my mom had been sitting in a wash tub full of dishes, the stopper plugged, and the dishes had sat there soaking while I cleaned up the rest of my life. I focused on my pregnancy, on my own fear, anxiety, and depression which had surrounded the idea of becoming a mom to my own daughter. I focused on reading and writing. I focused on a new job. I had focused on everything else I could. I washed and dusted and laundered everything else but had left the grief to soak. But when I looked at Dale’s youngest daughter hugging a woman who looked to be her elementary teacher—teachers can always spot other teachers—hugging her in that way that said the things that words can’t. I saw her tiny heart clench up and then relax into this woman and a small sob escaped her tiny frame. When it did, it was like someone had yanked the stopper from my grief and when the water rushed to empty the basin, it was still there. The grief hadn’t soaked away. It was still gritty and raw and so out of proportion with my position in this atmosphere, so I grabbed the keys to the truck, and I left. I needed more space than that crowded arena could offer me. I needed to find a place that wouldn’t question the unusual rawness of my own sobs. So, I sent myself away to my husband’s truck to grieve two people who never knew each other but who had both left strawberries on my skin. ◆
Rebecca Hamilton is a graduate of UC. She works as a secondary education teacher teaching high school language arts at Williamsburg City School. Ms. Hamilton spends her time raising her four-year-old daughter, reading as many books as possible, and practicing Olympic style lifting as a member at her local CrossFit gym.
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