Life After Death: When Family Becomes Both Prison and Refuge

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Maybe it was her natural obedience and tendency to the inobtrusive, which without speaking of it assured mother and father that the youngest was in no way capable of the same defiance, that she understood duty to God and family, that couldn't possibly conceive of the kind of understated and flagrantly ruinous suicide that her older sister had committed. Maybe it was her father's refusal to accept that his oldest daughter had ever existed that made it impossible for him to turn this into a teachable moment, or to twist the screws more tightly on his youngest, but the house became an American Gothic like a fever dream shared between Grant Wood and Carl Jung and the youngest was happy, if not sometimes overwhelmed, by the freedoms she never asked for but was sometimes allotted.