I’d been thinking about it now for a few years, but somehow never even got close enough to a tattoo palour to smell a whiff of the ink in the air or to hear the buzz of the tattoo pen. You’d think with my ENFP personality, the P-part of me would have jumped right in if I had just held the thought of a tattoo for more than a day in my head. But something always held me back and it wasn’t the fear of the pain of the needle. Heck, I gave birth to 3 of my 4 kids without using any pain-relieving drugs！

Well, reading AKR’s philosophy towards living and calculating how many days I had left to live two days ago finally did it for me. Since I had always wanted to get a tattoo, why wait another day longer. After all, you pay the price and endure the pain once, so wouldn’t you want to amortize the expense and pain over more days to make it more worthwhile？

And the “what” to tattoo was clear. Recently, two events moved me so seismically, they shook me to my core and were epiphanies for me. The first event was breaking bread with my catechism group over Matthew 5:43-48 about a month back. So Mt 5:43-48 became my first tattoo, inked beautifully into the inside wrist of my left arm.

The second was related to the post I wrote two days back. Towards the end of her love letter to her husband of 26 years, AKR talked about how in the time before her diagnosis, she had invited her readers to send in suggestions for matching tattoos, as an idea to bond the author and a reader together by ink on skin. The word “more”, submitted by a 62-year-old librarian in Milwaukee named Paulette, was the one picked by the author. It was the author’s first spoken word and it also captured in her dying days her wish for more time with her loved ones and more time to live life’s little pleasures.

more. 4 tiny letters that stirred such a deep yearning in me to live more, see more, do more, and … love more. And now, 4 tiny letters that are etched on my chest, close to my  heart as a daily reminder for the next 6606 days to do exactly that.