Is there a point where Edie's behaviour stops being eccentric and dysfunctional and simply becomes abusive? Look at what she does throughout the game: first, likely as a response to losing her father, her country of birth and her house all in one night, she mythologises generations of family deaths and passes that mythologised trauma on to each new Finch. Then she forces her son (and later her grandchildren) to sleep in a room which is a shrine to their dead sibling - not just until a new room was built to extend the house, but for years. Finally, when she feels she has totally lost the control she had over Dawn and the next generation of Finches, she irresponsibly mixes her meds with alcohol and is found possibly-maybe-accidentally dead the next day - which, if it wasn't accidental, reads like a final emotionally-scarring power play: death as an act of revenge against the people she felt abandoned her.

It's telling, perhaps, that Edie's final story is not about how she died at all: it's another attempt to snare Edith Jr. in the story of the family curse, tying her birth in to a trip to the mysteriously risen R'lyeh old house. While each of the other characters' stories reveals something about their own life and death, Edie's is the only one which deflects this.

If there really is a malign force acting in this game, echoing down through the generations and giving rise to misery and tragedy, I think it's reasonable to say one possible name for that force may be Edith Finch Senior. Or am I being unfair?