“I don’t care what people think of the fact that I let her get a tattoo. I think that those people who might be judging us are people who have maybe not suffered the kind of loss that she has.”

Those are the words of Diana Register, an author and mother of three from Idaho who, back in 2018, made the news for giving her 15-year-old daughter Kaitlyn permission to get a tattoo.

But this wasn’t some spur-of-the-moment desire to be edgy on the teen’s part.

This was a way for Kaitlyn to honor her father, a police officer who she saw draw his final breath after struggling with pancreatic cancer.

Register didn’t want her children to see their father that way, but her daughter wouldn’t budge. She was just 13 when he died and 15 when she asked her mother if she could get “a very small, very appropriate tattoo to honor her dad.”

But the mom struggled with the decision. Would her daughter regret it someday?

“What was her reason? What did she want? Was she trying to impress her friends? Was she just following some trend?” Register asked herself.

Kaitlyn’s older sister Savanna had gotten a tattoo to honor their dad a few years before – a subtle “I IV IX” on her foot. (1-4-9 was their father’s badge number.)

“I couldn’t think of a more beautiful tribute. In fact, it still takes my breath away,” Register said of her eldest daughter’s tattoo in an essay for Love What Matters. “I started thinking about the meaning and it was so much deeper than just numbers. You see, after his valiant fight with his disease, his badge number has become synonymous with strength, courage and hope. That’s what it means to me, and clearly what it means to my kids.”

As for “earning” her tattoo – it was more like acknowledging Kaitlyn’s strength in the face of her father’s death.

Register recalled the night her husband Chad passed away. He was unconscious and unaware, but his condition wasn’t the way you would necessarily want to remember someone.

“I told Kaitlyn she didn’t have to go back into the room to watch him die. I told her I would stay in the hall with her. I explained what was happening, that he couldn’t breathe, that there was a gurgling in his throat and it sounded like he needed to clear it but couldn’t. I told her he would not wake up. I told her that he was going to stop breathing. And she didn’t have to watch that.”

But there was nothing that was going to scare Kaitlyn away from being with her father in his final moments. She wouldn’t hear of staying outside the room.

Of course, the end was devastating.

“She said nothing as she blew past me and straight to his bedside to hold his hand. She told the nurse she was going to throw up. Her body shook. Tears fell from her eyes. Her dad gasped. She sat straight up, wiped her face, swallowed hard, squeezed his hand and told him he could go. She told him it was okay.”

The young teen even stayed in the room with his body for an hour after his passing. She didn’t want to let him go.

There was a period of upheaval after his death, but after taking time to hope, Kaitlyn returned to her life and even got involved in pancreatic cancer awareness. She also got her tattoo – similar to her sister’s, but placed on the side instead of the top of her foot.

“So when Kaitlyn and her sister decided to get a tattoo to respect the battle and to honor their hero that fell, there was no way I was standing in the way of that. Not for one second,” her mom said.

Mom, too, has some ink on her foot – a copy of Chad’s EKG from the day before he died.

She concluded her story with a defiant defense of her decision to let her daughter honor her father with a tattoo:

“So yes, I let my 15-year-old get a tattoo and no, I don’t care what anybody has to say about it, because they have shown me, you, and anybody else who will listen what surviving looks like. They get to show that off however they damn well want to. They’ve earned it.”

Be sure to scroll down below for an interview with Diana and Kaitlyn Register.

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Source: Inside Edition, Love What Matters, Inside Edition via YouTube