Survivor Guilt and Family Relationships After Accidental Death/Murder

[giveyoulife]

Setting: Connecticut, 1915 & New York, 1924. The family is fairly standard New England Protestant, somewhat rigid, not exactly wealthy but comfortable and refined

Comments

[nyxelestia]

For Reality A, as I understand it, repressing memories due to trauma has largely been debunked. If you really need Evie to lose her memory of the event, something like hitting her head on the side of the boat on the way down or the length of time she was underwater (and thus depriving her brain of oxygen) would be a better way to go

[whatifoundthere]

There was a short-lived TV series called Awake which had a similar premise. There was a car accident but different people survived the accident in two different realities, and the protagonist goes to therapy to figure out which reality is "real". I haven't seen the show myself, but maybe you can see how they dealt with these issues and see if some of it is useful for your story too?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awake_%28TV_series%29#Series_overview

[orange_fell]

By the 1910s-1920s, bits of Freudian psychology had trickled down into popular culture. Last year I reread a bunch of L. M. Montgomery, and even her small-town Canadian characters knew about "psycho-analysis" by the later books. But at the same time, those ideas were considered very radical and new. PTSD was unknown; instead, people would say that a shocking experience "gave her nightmares," or "she was never the same again." People's behavior at funerals was scrutinized. One character cried for her father in private and kept a stiff upper lip at his funeral, and her other relatives criticized her as "an unfeeling child."

Overall I think you have a lot of options with how your characters might react, just keep in mind that people's thoughts about mental health and emotional reactions were quite different back then.