"Crawling through the doggy door used to be a lot easier when I was eleven." Or specifically, it used to be a lot easier when Edith wasn't pregnant with her unborn son.
Giant Sparrow's previous game The Unfinished Swan also started with the untimely death of the protagonist's mother. Given how "The King" from that game who created her might actually be Milton Finch, she may have also inherited the Finch family's bad luck.
Here's something interesting regarding the curse: Edie, Sam, and Dawn each outlived all but one of their children. But what of Edith's generation? True, she only gives birth to one boy before she dies from childbirth. But she is notably the only generation who does not outlive at least one of her offspring. Perhaps a sign that the curse is waning a bit?
Another way in which her death is different: the obligatory text that explains her death - the journal she writes throughout the game - is the only one to take a proper look back at the Finch family legacy.
Edie seemed obsessed with memorializing her lost loved ones, almost to the point of denial of their deaths; Dawn simply sealed away all traces of her lost family members' existence. Perhaps it was Edith's frank, graceful acceptance of death - even her own - that broke the curse.
Edie also seems to have been extremely invested in sensationalizing the Finch deaths. The account of Barbara's death that she kept was a comic book that gave a very dramatized account of her death rather than something factual or something about her life, her story of her husband's death was that he died because of a dragon rather than because of a dragon-shaped slide, and Edith notes that while she doesn't believe Molly's diary was what actually happened, she thinks that Edie did. Dawn, and to a lesser extent Sam, did not want to think or speak of their dead relatives much at all. Edith breaks the trend by seeking out the various stories while simultaneously acknowledging where they may have been embellished and putting them into context in the greater family history.
Edith adds a sketch of each family member to her family tree diagram as she learns the story of his or her death. So it makes sense that a sketch of herself is present from the beginning - as she writes her memoir, she suspects, and rightly so, how she'll die.
Edith learns about each Finch's death from a piece of text. The entire game consists of her writing her own.
Notably, Edith learns about her family's history through 10 unique ways. Molly's was through a diary, Odin's drowning at sea was projected in a viewfinder, Sam wrote about Calvin's death in a school report dedicated to him, Barbara's fate was illustrated in comic book fashion, Walter wrote his story in an apocalyptic log, Sam's final moments were immortalized in photography, Dawn wrote a poem about Gus's death, Gregory's untimely demise was mentioned in a divorce paper between Sam and his ex-wife, Milton's mysterious disappearance was explained in a flipbook, and Lewis's death was explored in a letter from his therapist.
And fittingly enough, her son learns about his family in a unique way, a memoir
Apart from Odin, who never got to live in the new Finch house, every Finch's death-story is learned in their old bedroom... except Edie's, which we learn in Edith's room. This may symbolize a part of Edith dying the day she was torn away from Edie, although given Edie embraced the family death curse possibly to the point of enabling or even perpetuating it, it may have been for the best, allowing Edith to find a middle road between Dawn and Edie's attitudes.
Most of the family members' rooms that Edith explores contains books relating somehow to their personality. For instance: Sam, who was preoccupied with being prepared for everything in order to avoid the curse, has a shelf full of books on wilderness survival. When the players reaches Edith's room near the end of the game, the spines of the books on her shelf are blank, indicating that Edith doesn't need much of a personality, as the point of the game is to explore the family's history through her. This could also point towards the fact that the real protagonist of the game, Edith's son, doesn't know her that well, as she died in childbirth.
Some of the books found outside the library in the flashback to the night Edith and Dawn left the house are by Jorge Luis Borges, an author who specialised in Magical Realism. This is a nod to the Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane nature of certain elements in the story, including the Finches' curse, and the deaths of characters such as Molly and Barbara.
"To our final night together, and all our final nights apart." The second part is Edie making reference to everyone's inevitable Finchian deaths.
Edie's gravestone features a sculpture of a book surrounded by a cloud of letters. Given that one of her final acts was writing a book, and given one of the game's visual conceits of having transcripts of the narration appear on screen and dissolve into clouds of letters once that bit of narration is done, it's even more fitting for the younger of the Ediths.
Each of Edie's sons' lifespans and enjoyment of their lives and deaths correspond to how they approached life.
Walter becomes so scared, he becomes a lonely recluse in his own family household. He lives a long time, but comes to realize his safe life in the bunker is too confined. He dies trying to enjoy what little time he has before a train hits him.
Calvin promises to never be scared, and faces life with a bolder attitude. He lives out his dream to fly, but unfortunately, it becomes his undoing and ends his life prematurely.
Sam takes a moderation of both approaches and becomes both cautious but unafraid to live. Thus, his lifespan and enjoyment of life are moderate too. He lives a pretty full life where he's been to war, gotten married, gotten divorced, gotten married again, and had a family. By the time he dies during his hunting trip, he dies neither prematurely nor at a ripe old age.
Furthermore, the way each son lives his life stems partly from the murder of their older sister. Walter becomes scared due to the trauma of being just a few rooms away from Barbara's death, Calvin vows to never be afraid again at her funeral, and Sam decides to learn survival skills after Calvin's death only a year later. Barbara herself also falls in between her brothers' ages at their deaths, being neither a young child nor an adult.
Considering that Dawn sealed all of the rooms after Milton's disappearance, it seems slightly strange that the window into Milton's tower was already opened from the inside when Edith came back - until you remember that Milton is the King from The Unfinished Swan, so it's possible that Monroe's mother came through the same door into the real world that Milton used to enter the world of paintings, and therefore may have opened the window to get out of the tower!
Based on the King's age at a glance when his wife fell pregnant with Monroe, this may have even been recent, which means that Edith may have been the final death of the curse, considering her and Milton's sons would have been born around the same time as one another (Christopher before Monroe, obviously).
When one thinks about it, there's something rather messed up about Edie making a shrine to her infant grandson Gregory, especially if it hits home for his parents and siblings. But then one realizes: that's exactly the point! It's supposed to drive home the point of Edie's personal flaw of being Conditioned to Accept Horror: she can't comprehend that her coping mechanism of glorifying her relatives' deaths is insensitive to those (namely Dawn) who don't want to be reminded of their loss.
In "The Unfinished Swan", Milton (as an aged king) looks back on how everything he built (his stainless garden, his kingdom, his statue) either were ultimately for naught or simply didn't come to fruition. Yet, he admits that despite the temporary nature of everything he built, he still had fun making it to begin with, and would do it all over again if he had the chance. Looks like he shares his big sister Edith's unique brand of optimism, among other things.
Odin was obsessed with death and the curse himself. His shrine contains several books he wrote, all about death, and he was so desperate to escape the curse that he turned his entire house into a boat. He's where Edie got her obsession from.
There seems to be a cycle of three different methods of dealing with the curse within the heads of each branch of the family. Odin tries to escape the curse by moving his family all the way to the United States from Europe after the death of his wife and son, only to die before they can reach their destination. His daughter Edie relishes in telling the tales of the deaths of each member of the family, and is ultimately comfortable with death. Her son Sam tries to prepare his children for everything that comes in life, and to try and follow in his footsteps by doing the same for their children. The cycle then starts over with Dawn, who attempts to run away from the curse after the death and disappearance of her two sons, only to die before they can truly find somewhere safe. Her daughter Edith, like her namesake, then goes on to recount the deaths of her family members (as well as herself) in a journal for her unborn son, being resigned to death. While it's uncertain whether or not her son Christopher will continue on with his great-grandfather's method, Milton shows a bit of a mixture between the three, escaping (like his mother and great-great-grandfather) into his own world, giving his son his paint brush in order for him to be prepared (like his grandfather), and passing his legacy onto his son (like his great-grandmother and sister). This may be due to his status as an outlier on the family tree, possibly having broken the curse.
During Walter's story, he mentions the deaths of Molly, Barbara, and Calvin, leaving out the only sibling of his who was still alive before he went down in the bunker, Sam. This implies that Edie never told her son about his last brother's death, either due to lack of proper communication between the two, or a mother sparing her son the heartache of losing another sibling. For all Walter knew, Sam was still alive by the time he died.
Molly's room features a mural depicting a brick wall that has been broken open, revealing a magical castle. Edith notes that Milton has found the secret passage to the room before her. These two facts together answer an age-old question: where do artists get their ideas?
The first part of the shark sequence in Molly's story is played for laughs - a shark rolling down a hill, flopping about to get around trees and nearly getting hit by a car. But only that first part is mentioned in Molly's diary. Why did Edith imagine the rest in that way? She didn't - as evidenced by the floating texts from Edith's journal throughout the game, the entire game takes place in the imagination of the journal's reader, Christopher. A boy his age is far more likely to be imagining such gags.
No reason is given for Sam and Kay's divorce, but based on the tone of the divorce papers and the fact that Sam's calling Kay is what potentially distracted her and led to Gregory's death, it can be reasonably assumed that Gregory's death was not in fact the cause. The marriage was in trouble before that. So if Kay and Sam didn't divorce due to Kay not wanting to put up with the Finch family curse (which would have been a fair reason in its own right), why did they? The numbers show that Dawn was born when Sam was only 18, and Gus was born a year after. Then there was a gap of seven years before Gregory was born, but if we assume as implied that Kay and Sam were already fighting at the time of Gregory's death, these numbers have a lot more significance. One could reasonably assume that Sam and Kay got married way too young, had two children, started to have issues, had Gregory in an attempt to save their marriage, which obviously failed, and then divorced, sending Kay out of the Finch family tree to inexplicably never be heard from again.
The reason why the shaking monster Walter was scared of stopped for a week was because of the forest fire that happened. He was also the reason why Edie refused to leave.
Odin sailed his house from Norway to Washington state on the western side of the United States. That means either the story isn't true, or Odin was one hell of a sailor, since the shortest route he could have taken was straight through the Arctic Ocean, and the safest route was through the Panama Canal and up the Pacific.
Edith's own picture in the book has her holding up a phone. Obviously she'd have trouble drawing a picture of herself unaided, so she took a mirror selfie and based her drawing on that. She is a teenager in the 2010s, after all.
The most popular theory regarding Molly's ambiguous death is that since she ate holly berries, which are known to be poisonous when consumed, it killed her in her sleep. However, contrary to popular belief, holly berries aren't actually deadly, they just cause irritable conditions such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, dehydration, etc. So the berries alone killing her isn't likely. Although, on the other hand, consuming too much toothpaste causes intestinal blockage, with the intestines being a very delicate organ in children. With both of these being digested by a 10-year girl, the risk of dying could very well have been heightened for Molly.
The amount of holly berries she ate likely wouldn't have been enough to kill a kid, but they would have been enough to act as a hallucinogen. Remember that weirdo dream sequence where she turns into different animals? That didn't really happen, she was hallucinating, but like the player and Christopher, Molly wouldn't have known that.
Molly's transformations are related to the items in her room. She has a cat clock, a barn owl feather, a chart of the oceanic water column and a jellyfish plushy. The pet cemetery has a marker for Christopher, her pet goldfish, which dies in 1947, the same year as her. Did the fish die of natural causes? Did the rest of the family kill it because they couldn't bear to take care of it? Or did Molly draw inspiration from not just the deep ocean poster but also Christopher's presence, hallucinating that it was a shark and ultimately throwing it out of the window, explaining the weirdly comical start of the shark sequence?
The secret passageway into Walter's bunker was nonexistent when Barbara was still alive. And knowing Sven built the primary Finch house and all its additions, Sven may well have installed the bunker initially as a panic-room/safe-room for young Walter as a means to help him calm down when the outside world became too frightful for him. But after the death of a second sibling, and then his father's death as he was building Walter a gift for his twelfth birthday, Walter may have moved into the bunker full time, possibly from a combination of fear and guilt. At least by the time he was 16, as the first day we see his calendar is 1968.
Someone pointed out how two of the animals (the swallow and the rabbit) Molly ate in her dream are mothers. Remember how Edie, her mother, locked her in her room without dinner that night?
The characters in Lewis' sequence have rather crude features (i.e. no faces) as if they were figurines. It becomes especially noticeable in the throne room, which also features a huge cat. If you look around in Lewis' room, you can find figurines that look just like those in the sequence, so those characters don't just look like figurines, but they are figurines themselves. It makes the cat's size appropriate.
In Lewis' coronation dream, it is mentioned that the family cat, named after Molly, "insisted on advising him". Molly and Lewis both died immersed in their own fantasy world in which they were able to escape the situation they felt trapped in by imagining themselves as something greater. Molly was also the first Finch to die in the house, and Lewis the last before Dawn's decision to leave.
Lewis was Dawn's oldest child. By the time of Milton's disappearance, he was more than old enough to explore the house and listen to Edie's stories about the Finches before Dawn sealed all of the rooms. He would hear about his ancestor Odin who sailed from Norway to Washington on a house, his great-grandfather Sven who was killed by a dragon(-shaped slide), his grandfather Sam a decorated soldier and hunter, his great aunt Barbara the child star, his great uncle Walter the mole man, his mother and father who traveled the world to help people—even Milton was a very talented artist, and Edie no doubt would embellish his disappearance as actually finding a magic paintbrush to another world. He was surrounded by fantastic stories and events, and saddled with the idea that he could die young and randomly due to the family curse. It's of little wonder why Lewis retreated into a fantasy world where he is a king, instead of a boring cannery worker.
An interesting thing to cite is how history repeated. Dawn died trying to flee the (supposed) curse and, her daughter, Edith succumbs to obstetric complications, almost exactly like Edie's parents, Odin and Ingeborge. The Finch legacy almost ends exactly where it started.
Edith signs off her diary, which was written for her son, with just her name instead of something like "Mom". She knew she won't become his mother as she passed away shortly after she had given birth to him, which means she wasn't the one to raise him, and that Christopher will only remember her through the journal as the one who brought him to the world instead of his mother.
Barbara's severed ear was never in her music box. When you wind the music box as Edith, it looks completely untouched. Sure, the music box could have been cleaned, but consider how Edie memorializes and preserves all her late family members and their deaths. She kept the pictures capturing the deaths of her husband and son, for heaven's sake. If there had been evidence of a body part stuffed in the music box, Edie would have made sure it stayed there.
Even though salmon made up such an enormous part of the family's diet, there's none in Walter's bunker under the house. All of his food supplies seem to have consisted of fruits and vegetables. This may relate to the stereotypical connotation between vegetarianism and timidity, or sometimes even cowardliness.
There's a strange math to the deaths of the Finch family, by generation. Edie by far lived the longest at 93, though she had a baby sibling who died. Edie's children were a mixed bag, two dying before their twelfth birthday, and only one seeing 50. Then Sam's children include another infant death, a teenager who just barely qualifies as a teen, and Dawn who lives to be 48. Dawn's children die at 22, 17, and potentially 11 (though Milton does skew the numbers a bit). This means the average lifespan by generation goes 47, 24~25, and 20~21. The lifespan of the Finches is getting shorter (Odin might skew the numbers too, but nothing is known about any siblings he may have had) which is terrifying enough. But moreover, while it isn't fixed, it seems the longer one child lives, the more likely their siblings will die younger.
Or it might just be the only way to narratively explain why Edith's generation is dead.
Molly's story came first, and unlike the rest there's nothing so blatant as the rest to indicate what would have caused her death, save her explanation of the monster under her bed. Then you look at the things she ate because she was so hungry before her death. Most of them seem fairly innocuous and unlikely to kill a child. An old carrot from her hamster. A tube of toothpaste. And then the berries. Holly berries, though not especially well known, are poisonous. Molly probably died of eating the poison berries, and being so young, ended up dying in her sleep.
Large amounts of toothpaste can be poison too - that's why it is meant to be spat out instead of swallowed.
The way she described how she kept getting "hungrier" may have in fact been stomach pains, as holly berries can cause stomachaches and diarrhea.
That carrot could have caused food poisoning because it was sitting out who knows how long. Though, if one were to guess, and remembering that kids have sensitive intestines, the possibilities of what could have killed her in her sleep get even more horrifying: she either could have died because of a blockage or rupture, or she could have died because of sepsis caused by either one of the first two. That is, if she wasn't sick the entire time.
Not only did poor Dawn have to witness her father Sam's sudden death, keep in mind that they were on a camping trip at the time. That means Dawn (who was, at most, fifteen) had to find a way to get help afterwards all by herself. No wonder she began to dread the family curse so much.
The comic book detailing Barbara's death says that she was only able to replicate her famous scream when...someone attacked her in the house and murdered her. Whether it was her boyfriend, the reported Serial Killer loose in the area, or even a group of fans that turned out to be real monsters (as the comic claims) is unknown, but where could the detail about her screaming have come from? Walter, who had been hiding in his room at the time. He probably heard his sister's Death Wail, and part of the reason he ended up so traumatized by her death in particular was because he was unable to save her.
According to the comic, Barbara's body was never recovered, with the only trace that was found of her being her ear, which had been placed in her music box. This is horrifying enough on its own, but it's also mentioned that her boyfriend Rick, whom she'd kicked out of her house just before her death, had gone missing as well. So not one, but two teenagers vanished without a trace, with Rick presumably also declared dead. And that's not even getting into if Rick had been the one who killed Barbara...
On the flip side, what if Rick didn't have anything to do with Barbara's death? What if the Glory Hound portrayal of Rick in the comic was just another creative liberty in a sensationalized retelling of a Former Child Star's death? What if a Loony Fan took this portrayal at face value and decided to seek "justice" for Barbara?
Edith claims that she and her mother ended up leaving the house when she was young without taking anything with them. One hopes that they at least took enough pause to grab their beloved pet cat, or else poor kitty Molly would've been left alone in an abandoned house in the woods with no one to care for her if the people from the nursing home who found the dead Edie didn't take her with them either.
Edith mentioned that Edie watched them pack, so they probably did take the cat, if the cat was still with the family by that point.
Considering that the pet cemetery is even bigger than the one for humans, it would not be surprising if the cat was abandoned and died as well.
The idea adds 'nother point Fridge Brilliance and Fridge Horror. Some of the Finch kids (Gregory, Gus, and Calvin) died because of some form of neglect, so, with that in mind, the Finch curse wasn't so nice to their pets either.
It is likely Molly was the cat that runs away after opening a window early in the game, assuming she is indeed the "wise calico" that he imagined as his advisor. While the cat seen appears to have tortoiseshell markings (two colors, usually with one showing as streaks in the other) instead of calico markings (three colors in distinct splotches), the two coat patterns are often referred to interchangeably.
Reading betwixt a few lines, particularly with his substance usage, ya'll could take a guess that Lewis suffered from clinical depression. Yeah....
, they just cause irritable conditions such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, dehydration, etc. So the berries alone killing her isn't likely. Although, on the other hand, consuming too much toothpaste causes intestinal blockage, with the intestines being a very delicate organ in children. With both of these being digested by a 10-year girl, the risk of dying could very well have been heightened for Molly.