For the last five months, every sixth day of the month, Kara Bosworth takes to Instagram to write something about her late son. As Mamas Uncut previously reported, Kara and her husband, Kyle Bosworth, lost their infant son shortly after he was born on April 6.
As Kara explained in her original Instagram post, the baby boy they named McCoy was born weighing “in at 11 pounds and 4 ounces and spanning 21 inches, McCoy surprised us all with his size and strength (and overall perfection). During the course of his birth, he experienced shoulder dystocia and a compressed umbilical cord.”
Kara Bosworth’s Husband Gets the Ashes of Their Late Son Tattooed Into His Arm
Some hours later, McCoy passed away and his parents made the decision to donate his organs to those in need. In the months since, Kara has used her Instagram to open up about the grief she has felt.
Her most recent post, on what would have been McCoy’s 5-month birthday, revealed that Kyle used some of their son’s ashes to get a tattoo of his footprints on the inner part of his bicep. Along with a black and what photo of McCoy’s big sister, Decker, delicately touching her dad’s new tattoo, Bosworth began by saying, “I can feel it coming every month, like a pressure system building before the storm that comes on the 6th.”
“The air is denser, my chest tighter. 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,” Kara wrote on Instagram. “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.”
Bosworth went on to talk about how she opened the proverbial box just the other day while “laying in your daddy’s arms, where your ashes are tattooed on his skin in the shape of your perfect feet.” She added that more of her tears have “washed over your feet in the last 5 months” than in 31 years she lived before meeting their son.
“Opening the box on the 6th is 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. You would have been 5 months old. You’d be looking like the marshmallow man in your sleepsuit. 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. Instead, we scrunch up and shudder because of the lemons this life has given us.”
As Kara concluded, she wrote that while the passing of her baby boy has left her with feelings she never wanted to feel, McCoy’s “loss hasn’t soured us,” she admitted. On the contrary, in fact, the mom writes, “You’ve sweetened us. Like salt on watermelon.”
“Life after loss is a juxtaposition that only makes sense once you’ve tasted it,” Kara said. “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?'”
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Kara Bosworth then offered some advice to those who are in a similar season of life. “To my partners in pain: Don’t waste perfectly good grief, it can change your life for the better if you let it.”