My Inheritance: Mom's Clinique Clarifying Lotion "Clarifiante" 2
I'm 56 and I still don't get the T-zone.
Seven years ago, on April 25, I lost my Mom. She went suddenly — leukemia, 10 days. My Dad, my brother, and I were all in shock. Our savior was my sister-in-law’s father, a retired mortician, who gave us many helpful tips, including this one: go to the bathroom and clear it out. Now.
Riding the wave of that initial grief is like surfing, the surge lifted me as I emptied drawers and medicine cabinets into black plastic bags. The waste is terrible, but you have to keep the arms moving, or you will drown.
You’re in a race against time. For as powerfully as the wave carries you in, it will suck back out, ditching you alone on the sand, seized by a sudden sentimentality for an expired Albuterol inhaler. The intimacy of these objects is truly unbearable.
I was on a roll— donate, toss, keep — but the longer you go, the arms slow. Exhausted, I opened a medicine cabinet packed with lotions, cremes, and skincare. Mom had this way of using all the product except the last little bit, the same way I eat a bag of potato chips and leave one to prove I didn’t finish it.
Then I found one of these, almost full.
Speaking as a girl who came of age in the make-up obsessed, class-obsessed Alabama 80s, I cannot exaggerate the idolization we held for Clinque products. This was the era of the department store, the bright lights, and shiny counters. The Clinque Clinicians were our scientific fairy godmothers in white lab coats, promising to sculpt our blotchy teen faces into a Charlie’s Angel. Bibbity-Bobbity!
I obsessed over the Clinique Computer, which determined your skin type, in awe of the mysterious “T-Zone” as if it were a sort of Bermuda Triangle. I’m sure the Clinicians grew tired of me, a decidedly unpaying customer, sliding the silver knobs back and forth hoping to shrink my pores.
We were middle-class class and my parents didn’t financially prioritize my fitting in high school. No designer jeans or Ralph Lauren polos. “The JCPenney Fox is perfectly fine.” My make-up consisted of shoplifted Maybelleine’s Blooming Blues and Cover Girl foundation, two shades too dark and too orange for my pink skin, cutting the dreaded line along my jaw.
Popular girls had the Clinique space-age silver sliding boxes of eyeshadow and those tiny green tubs of shiny lip gloss they applied with a lip brush. If only, I yearned. With time, I’ve learned that the only way to like your face is to decide you like your face, but back then, I put all my hopes and supermodel dreams into makeup.

I can only imagine what it was like for Rose to sort through her mother’s things after Laura died, given the importance placed on symbolic objects in the books—the fiddle, the china shepherdess, the Big Green Book, a tin cup, a shiny penny… The Little House books hadn’t reached icon status yet, but they were very popular. Today, Laura’s little house in Mansfield, Missouri, is a museum.
Laura wrote in a letter dated five years before her death that Rose should take whatever jewelry she wanted and sell the rest. I suspect Laura knew Rose didn’t share her same fondness for primping and accessorizing. Rose’s single-authored writing isn’t filled with descriptions of Blackberry buttons or ostrich feathers, whereas those details were clearly forever etched in Laura’s memory.

Like Laura, Mom had more money in the later part of her life to spend on jewelry, clothes, and products. I took the best of Mom’s expensive creams home, which I have used liberally over the years, slathering eye cream on my knees or serums on my feet at will. TBH, lotion is lotion to me.
The only product that remains now is that Clinique bottle.
Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer Caroline Fraser’s take on Rose and Laura's relationship is that despite Laura’s love for her parents and despite her real-life Horatio Alger story that in the end, “…somehow, the bond with her daughter had proved the most difficult trial of all.”
Mom and I were able to repair from the screaming matches of my teenage years, and my time as The Family Disappointment through my 20s and 30s. We didn’t have Deep Talks. She expressed her love by taking me shopping during my annual Christmas visit. I was broke, but damn if I didn’t have Kenneth Cole boots. Once a year, I’d run around White House/Black Market like a contestant on Supermarket Sweep. Seven years later, I’ve gone up a size and my wardrobe feels the pinch. I miss those bougie boots.
Jonathan Van Ness would no doubt gasp in horror that I’m still applying what must be (at least) decade-old toner to my face. But the internet tells me alcohol has an “indefinite shelf life,” and the primary ingredient is “water/aqua/eau,” which I now know is three ways of saying “water.”
Is the toner hurting or helping my face? I can’t tell. But Mom taught me to finish what I start.
Every morning, I dab my face, turn the folded toilet paper square over, and admire the dirt removed, mostly makeup I never fully washed off the night before.
I keep expecting the bottle to empty, but it’s a Catholic version of the Miracle of Hanukkah. And no, I’m not the most consistent skin caretaker, and yes, maybe I’m hoarding this last ounce. My niece gave me a bottle of witch hazel last Christmas. One day, that bottle will be the replacement.
Shout out to The Keepthings for the content inspo. I wrote a similar essay for this pub called “Mom’s Lipstick.” These essays, “stories of lost loved ones inspired by the things they left behind,” are always good. The best way to read them is on Instagram, The Keepthings, @thekeepthings
*Argh! Just hit send and realized I misspelled “Hanukkah.”
Oh my damn, Kelly. I am so incredibly sorry that I somehow didn't know you lost your Mom. Please forgive me for being neglectful. We have so much to talk about but mostly I really need to give you a giant prairie-style hug.
Your words hit me on a visceral level; both my parents are gone now & two of us live in the house they SCRAPED to buy and kept SCRAPING to keep through 14 years of my Dad's disability and then leukemia & death when I was on the doorstep of adulthood almost 30 years ago. My Mom left us a bit over 2 years ago. Some things of hers are still where she left them. It's been an emotional process that exceeds my worst breakup to even begin filtering through the belongings and reminders of both parents and a decent smattering of objects they'd each kept to remember *their own* parents. And since I'm one of many, any time I come across something I think can be donated or sold or tossed I have to ask myself: will my siblings or Mom's sister or those older cousins who adored my parents or knew our grandparents far better than I ever did--will any of them want this?
And what if I finally finish these essays, the memoir, the trilogy, the giant migration study research project & its companion, the creative nonfiction "yet another why LIW matters to me and what I did about it" book that people keep telling me to write? What if I actually make viable contributions to the LIW canon or the fiction market or just document something somewhere that people will give a sh*t about? Will some second cousin thrice removed care in 2083 that I saved this 19th century whatnot that came from my Dad's mother's house and might have been her mother's and mattered so much in my childhood because I knew it had a name because Laura wrote about having one in her own home on the Dakota plains that I begged my Dad to bring it home and he did and I kept it and then I wrote about it? (That really happened.)
It's a lot.
I kept a few other treasures. I'm still working on it. I've tried to write about it. I'm not wholly ready, but I'm getting there. I, too, follow The Keepthings. Reading others' stories is soothing, and the stories make me feel as if I knew the person upon whose death the author suddenly sees, perhaps for the first time, as a whole person. I can't tell you how many moments I've had like that but I suspect it will never end.
The weirdest, loneliest, most daunting part about losing a parent is how often the very person who might have great insight to your emotions & how to manage them in your grief is...the very one you're grieving.
Anyway. I'm so sorry. May your little bottle of Clinique forever offer just a little more.