Picking out the outfit to bury my mother in was hardest for two reasons: One, she owned a lot of clothing. Two, she had very picky taste.

Of course, the task was difficult for all of the reasons one might imagine – a welling of grief and anguish; the palpable emptiness in the wake of loss.

But standing in my mother’s vanilla-scented closet a mere two days after her passing, I hadn’t processed much of anything. I was still half expecting to hear the distinct clack of her high-heeled boots coming around the corner. Sifting through the hangers of olive-colored skirts and beaded tank tops, all I could really think was would she want a jean or leather jacket?

Like many mother-daughter relationships, ours often defaulted to clothing, make-up, and beauty. My mother had always been interested in fashion and aesthetics. I found a picture of her when she was about my age, 23, in the 1980s -- clad in a bold neon top, flare jeans, and dangling earrings. From a young age I remember us bonding through trips to the mall, trying on accessories in her bathroom, strutting through the house for first day of school fashion shows.

Our connection went far beyond bracelets and broaches. As I grew up, we shared our career aspirations, political opinions, our deepest fears and anxieties. My mother was a fierce, stubborn, hard-working woman. She was also a woman who cared about her appearance. She cared about maintaining her body. She enjoyed material things.

As I write this, I wonder how people are perceiving her. Materialism has such a fraught history in our culture. America was partially founded on a religious philosophy that prohibited material pleasure. The Puritan ethic understood materialism as a sin, yet it is natural to attach emotional significance to our material things. I put on one of my mother’s denim skirts from when she was my age and I feel closer to her.

As capitalism dominated the United States, the idea that materialism was sinful had to mold. Today we live in a world that sells the notion that ‘sufficient’ is never enough. The belief that more is better has been permeating our society through advertising since the nineteenth century. First the message appeared through billboards and posters, then radio and TV. Now, materialism has become inescapable through the internet and our social media platforms. I scroll through my Facebook and an ad for red heels pops up – daring me to click and fill my inner-most emptiness with more things.

The worldwide beauty industry is a $425 billion production based on selling that exact belief -- that you yourself are not enough. Women especially are targeted by these aesthetic industries. From the time that we are girls, we are hardwired to believe that certain material items are the key to not only our happiness, but also our success.

A conversation about the beauty industry is also a conversation about socioeconomics and race. Growing up in a predominantly white, upper-class neighborhood, I saw many women deal with the pressures of the beauty industry by simply giving into them … because they could. My own mother’s bathroom counter was lined with anti-aging face creams and expensive make-up.

In high school, I began to really notice how much my mother tied her sense of self to how she looked. I judged her. I resented her. But I also related to her. Hasn’t every restless woman once asked herself: would I be happier if I were prettier? Skinnier? More youthful? I began to notice how other people treated me differently depending on if I was wearing a ratty old T-shirt or a tight skirt and lip gloss.

One of the greatest dangers as a young woman is to buy into the idea that your worth is bound up in your physical appearance. Yet how can we fully detangle from this belief when the value of our physical appearance is reinforced by society at every turn? As long as women are broadly objectified, their physical appearance will function as a core value and the absence of their beauty will be perceived as something to fix.

I could judge my mother all I wanted, but the pressure to look a certain way is even greater for aging women. As Susan Sontag puts it in her essay, The Double Standard of Aging, “For women, only one standard of beauty is sanctioned: the girl.” The beauty industry then has an even greater hold over aging women – enticing them to time travel through a portal to the past through the purchase of certain products.

If aesthetic pressures are intensified for aging women, they become even more complex for sick women. When my mother’s chronic cancer turned terminal at age 59, the way that she related to aesthetics took on a new layer of significance.

When you are sick you are stripped of yourself. I saw this firsthand as my mother lost her appetite, her hair, and then her desire to get up in the mornings. A woman who once took so much pride and joy in getting ready in the mornings and being out and about in the world felt too ashamed and ostracized to leave her bedroom.

The black feminist poet, Audre Lorde’s 1980 book, The Cancer Journals, begs us to confront the intersection between feminism and illness. Sickness robs women in of their selfhood in a particularly insidious way. If women are taught to internalize their worth through their physical self, then sickness is the ultimate threat to their personhood.

Many sick women have written about the ways in which they feel robbed of their bodies and thus robbed of themselves. In her memoir, The Undying, Anne Boyer writes about sick women who feel so detached from their bodies that they must go to extreme measures to reclaim themselves.

At first when my mother got sick, I couldn’t understand why her aesthetic deterioration seemed to be the most agonizing part of all of it for her. I wished so badly that she would be a woman who would boldly buzzed off all of her hair and fought societal standards as she fought the disease.

But when you are a sick woman, you are up against even more societal stigma than before. The capitalist ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ mentality applies even to the sick and dying. We praise and encourage people to fight the disease – as if they can disown what is happening inside of their body and come back anew. My mother kept being told to fight – “keep fighting,” “you’re so strong” – as if her strength was dependent on enduring a never-ending pain.

Our medical system contributes to this pressure. Not only are toxic treatments pushed at all costs, but in the hospital, your particular body becomes the body – converted into a test tube through an endless collection of data.

My mother decided to stop treatments when it was clear that they would only prolong a painful quality of life. She could no longer be the devoted mother, loyal friend, or fierce workhorse that made up her identity.

Instead, she put all of her energy into getting a wig. In her final days, she put on lipstick in the hospital mirror.

She didn’t want to be pumped with more poison, she wanted us to paint her nails.

The idea of beauty as a site of resistance rather than capitulation circles back to Lorde and her fight with breast cancer. In 1988, she wrote, “Caring for myself is not an act of self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

I came to see my mother’s desire to maintain her aesthetic as her form of warfare in a battle that had suddenly and brutally stripped her of her identity, her motherhood, and her womanhood at a young age.

My mother literally wore that wig until the day she died. I now see it as her reclaiming of herself in a world that had taken so much from her. Sometimes I look at that wig -- sitting in her closet – long, beautiful, blonde locks.

They were not her own. But they gave an important piece of herself back to her when nothing else could.