The Life of Rose (2010 - 2020)

Ever since Rose passed, my “family” has been trying to invert the narrative my sister was truly close to them and is ashamed of me for telling her truth. While I mentioned I don’t use AI to write my experience, to avoid any interpretation of dramatization of actual facts, I have found a good use for it below. I exported Facebook messages. She had two accounts, and this is the one she had for the decade between 2010 and 2020. Yes, this is AI, but I do have the full documents back it up and far more. While painful, I think this is important to share, because it summarizes the adult experience of a Filicide Survivor from the inside. My prompt was a request for it to analyze her life and who she was, our relationship, and her relationship to others in her life. I have not added anything to the text below. Some text has been removed for the sake of others who were not the primary perpetrators. It’s true she hurt me, and I hurt her, out of pain, as you can see from the exchange of our letters covered in this text. But the through line is deep love. Unfortunately, she took far more accountability than was hers to own, because those around her could take none.

Psychoanalytic Portrait: Rose — The Decade Before

Based on documented Facebook correspondence, January 2010 – April 2020

The texts analyzed previously — December 2023 through September 2024 — showed Rose in the final year of her life: clear-eyed, analytical, exhausted, still reaching. This record shows the decade that built toward that. It is messier, more fragmented, harder to read — because she was living inside the system that the later texts described. The later Rose had language for what had been done to her. The earlier Rose was still trying to outrun it.

What is remarkable is not how different she was. It is how recognizable she already was, even then.

Who She Was in This Decade

The Woman Who Sent Animal Videos

The most consistent thing in this entire record — across every rupture, every crisis, every period of silence — is that Rose sent animal videos. Goofy ones. Baby dachshunds with bananas. Dogs stealing things. Cats knocking objects over. A sharpei she suddenly decided she wanted. She forwarded chain letters she found sweet. She sent the Palm Sunday blessing emoji chain in April 2020, the last entry in this file, because she wanted you to know you were one of her special people.

This is not a small thing. A person under the kind of sustained psychological pressure Rose was under will often stop sending delight. She never did. The animal videos, the chain messages, the cartoons — “I never get cartoons from anyone BUT my baby sister” — are evidence of a person who kept her capacity for lightness intact even when her life was in pieces around her. She found things funny. She wanted to share them with you. She kept doing this for a decade.

That is a form of survival. It is also a form of love.

The Woman Who Was Proud of Her Work

This record contains something the later texts do not: Rose in her professional life, and she was genuinely impressive there. In 2017, navigating a job search from a treatment facility with limited resources, she received six offers out of seven completed interviews. She evaluated them systematically — base pay, commission structure, growth trajectory, benefits, workplace culture, licensing potential — and turned down the flashier offer with the gym and the nail salon because she understood the long-game economics of the less glamorous one. She was analytical, strategic, and self-aware. She noted that she was the only female BDR in her office and handled it without complaint. She worried about what to wear on her first day, asked you practical questions about disclosure, studied on weekends.

The Rose in those work texts is someone who was trying very, very hard to build a real life. She was not passive about her circumstances. She was actively fighting them, with whatever tools she had.

She also knew she was smart in ways the family had never validated. She had a psychology degree, a clinical vocabulary she used fluently long before the later texts, and a habit of applying it to herself with dark accuracy — noting when the doc asking if her speech was racing might want to consider whether they were contributing to the problem. “I guess I should know what that is, being a psych major,” she said about EMDR, with the particular dry bite of someone whose education was never allowed to serve her. She was right. She did know. The family had spent decades making sure that knowledge couldn’t quite save her.

The Woman Who Loved Your Son Before She Met Him

Owen appears in this record before Rose ever saw his face. She asked about him constantly — asked about his laugh, his sleep, his personality, his relationship with the cats. She sent Christmas presents from wherever she was living, at whatever financial cost, because she would not be the aunt who forgot him. She apologized for the delay. She worried he would be “too old” before she got there. When she finally saw the first video of him laughing, she wrote back that it was one of the cutest things she’d ever seen and asked if she was “allowed” to be biased since she was related.

She didn’t get to be in his life. That fact sits under this entire record like a fault line.

The Woman Who Apologized Too Much

One of the most painful patterns in this decade of correspondence is how often Rose apologized. She apologized for texting late. She apologized for not sending gifts on time. She apologized for the “late response.” She apologized for “unloading.” She apologized for not being “in a better financial position.” She apologized for causing worry. She apologized for “being dumb.” She preemptively apologized for things that hadn’t happened yet.

This is not normal contrition. This is what happens when a person has been conditioned from childhood to take up as little space as possible, to pre-empt punishment with self-diminishment, to treat their own needs as impositions on others. She had learned the lesson perfectly: make yourself small, apologize preemptively, and maybe this time you won’t be abandoned.

The tragedy is that the apologies were accompanied by genuine grace. When she wrote the long January 2017 letter — before seeing a professional, because she wanted to respond carefully and didn’t want you to think your words had “fallen on deaf or uncaring or resentful ears” — she articulated her accountability with more clarity and emotional intelligence than most people are capable of in their best moments. She did not excuse. She explained, carefully, the difference between a reason and an excuse. She held both her love for you and her recognition of harm simultaneously, without collapsing either.

That letter is one of the most beautiful things in this record. It is also heartbreaking, because she was writing it from a treatment facility, at rock bottom, having just escaped a situation that nearly killed her — and her first instinct was to make sure you were okay.

The Abuse: What This Record Documents

Beth as Control System

The portrait of Beth that emerges from this decade is not of a dramatic abuser, though the drama is present. It is of a system. Beth operated as a total environment — one that Rose could never fully escape because Beth always made herself structurally necessary, and then weaponized that necessity.

The mechanism is visible across the whole record:

Creating dependency, then deploying it. In 2017, Rose needed help getting to (location). Beth helped her relocate — “even if it WAS just to get me away from (boyfriend),” Rose noted, with clear-eyed accuracy about the motivation. But then Beth moved to (location) too. “She only moved out here after I left (boyfriend) because her words were ‘I cannot see my grandchildren, and you are 35 and you don’t have much time left.’” Help was always transactional, always tethered. The terms were never stated in advance.

Using Rose’s access to Victoria as leverage. The February 2020 exchange is a textbook example. Beth agreed to Rose visiting (Victoria’s location) — agreed to no-contact with Victoria — and then, the moment travel was scheduled, reversed and threatened to sue for grandparent visitation rights. “It went from ‘I’ll pay your ticket’ to she’s going to sue you to see her grandchild.” The visit was never really about the visit. The visit was a pressure point. Rose absorbed the consequence — another cancelled trip, another failed attempt to see her nephew — and scheduled an ED IOP instead because she had nowhere else to put it.

Controlling information and communication. Beth cut off Rose’s phone. She monitored what Rose was allowed to watch on television (“she gets REALLY mad if I try to watch anything I like such as Criminal Minds, Law & Order or ANY shows like that — she thinks they are depressing, the devil”). She was present in Rose’s living situations in ways that required Rose to leave when Beth had guests, to sleep where Beth permitted, to be available on Beth’s timeline. She inserted herself into Rose’s psychiatric care, sending Rose to an EMDR therapist not covered by insurance — and the subtext in Rose’s text is unmistakable: “God forbid, I remember.”

Providing care that functioned as harm. The most documented version of this from the later texts — Beth supplying Rose alcohol “for medicinal purposes” — has its roots in patterns already visible here. Beth’s “help” always came with strings that made Rose less capable of independence, not more. Treatment attempts were derailed by insurance, by geography, by logistics that Beth controlled. Recovery was structurally prevented while care was performed.

Physical violence. Mentioned almost in passing: Beth shoved Rose out of a moving car. Rose hurt her neck. She reported it to you without apparent expectation of consequences for Beth, because there never were any.

Gary as Architecture of Denial

Gary appears in this record less than Beth, but his role is precise. He apologized for Beth’s behavior on his birthday — “Dad actually apologized to me for that” — but the apology was a pressure release valve, not a change. He drove Rose’s car and dog to (location) when she relocated, which meant he was functionally present in the logistics of her life while never meaningfully protecting her within it. He stayed in contact with family members who could relay information — “he’s been talking to Dad so he knows I’m ok” — which kept the information network intact without requiring accountability.

The specific detail Rose reported to you in 2017: when Beth wanted Rose to break up with (boyfriend), it was not because he had been involved with dangerous people or was a heroin addict who was nearly dying. It was “because I was screwing her out of a chance of being able to play with her grandchildren.” Gary was present in all of this and did not intervene. He never did. His function in the family was to make Beth’s behavior survivable enough that everyone stayed. He performed that function consistently.

The family currency — money, access, approval — moved through Beth, and the family was embedded in that system in a way ensnared Rose while you fully escaped. Rose understood this without apparent bitterness, which may reflect her extraordinary generosity, or may reflect how normalized the dynamic had become.

The Eating Disorder: What This Record Reveals

This is the decade in which the eating disorder’s roots — and its relationship to everything else — become visible.

Rose stated it clearly in the January 2017 letter, and it deserves to be held: “If you remember, I had that problem long before alcohol. Really my whole life, it was about eating and then not eating before alcohol ever entered the picture.” She had been severely anorexic — 118 pounds, freezing in 100-degree weather, hair falling out, blood pressure near nothing. She understood the neuroscience: the restriction produced a high, the same reward pathway as alcohol. She understood why treatment for substance use alone kept failing: “You can’t just cut it out. It’s kind of like telling a heroin addict they can have a little bit every day.”

And she understood something the treatment systems she encountered kept missing: the resentments that twelve-step programs ask you to release were not past-tense. “How do you let go of resentments if somebody is STILL hurting you?” This is not resistance to recovery. This is an accurate observation about the impossibility of healing inside an ongoing traumatic environment. The literature bears her out. She knew it from the inside.

She was trying to get to (facility) — an ED-specialized program — and was systematically blocked. Insurance denied the exception. The private insurance she purchased turned out to be an indemnity product, not real coverage. The treatment facility she did access put her on a sleep medication with weight-gain side effects and she told them directly: “I told them I was going to binge.” She was not passive in her own care. She was articulate about what she needed. The systems failed her, repeatedly.

The 2019 message — “I’m healthy w my ‘eat nothing’ diet & I’m bored & goofing around on FB” — is Rose in dark-humor mode, the mode you recognized in the later texts. But it is also a status report. By 2019, still not adequately treated, still living in proximity to Beth, the disorder was active. She had just started another IOP in February 2020. She never stopped trying to address it. The systems never adequately helped her.

Your Relationship with Each Other

The Texture of This Decade

This is not a simple sisterhood story. This decade contains real rupture — periods when you blocked her number, when contact broke down, when the weight of her addiction became genuinely damaging to your wellbeing during your pregnancy. None of that is erased by grief, and the record does not require it to be.

What the record shows is something more complicated and, in the end, more moving: two people who kept finding their way back to each other across a decade of structural interference, mental illness, addiction, and geographic distance, because the underlying bond was real enough to survive all of it.

The January 2017 letter — your letter, and her response — is the center of this decade. You were honest about the impact of her drinking. You described the pregnancy anxiety, the disappearances, the lying, the showing up drunk to her own birthday dinner. You held all of it and still said: I love you. I want to know you. I need you to be consistent enough that I can trust this. She received it without defensiveness, took accountability without self-destruction, and wrote back that she was proud of you and that your family was “a gift” — the same word she would use in the final year’s texts.

That exchange is not the exchange of a sister who had given up. It is the exchange of two people trying to negotiate a relationship under impossible conditions, with whatever tools they had.

What This Decade Means

The later texts are Rose with distance and language. This is Rose inside it — still forming the clarity that would eventually crystallize. She could already name “splitting.” She knew what EMDR was. She recognized the folie à deux between her parents before she had used that phrase to you. She understood that she was “cleaning up after Beth’s dog” — literally and figuratively — as her mother’s system operated around her.

The animal videos ran through all of it. She sent one from her phone while she was figuring out how to leave a group chat. She sent one two weeks after a serious burn accident. She sent the Palm Sunday chain in April 2020 because you were one of her special people and she wanted you to know.

She was trying to get to (Victoria’s location) to see Owen for years. She almost made it in February 2020. Beth made sure she didn’t.

There is a line from this record that could have been written by the Rose of 2024: “I never meant to hurt you in any way. That’s why I made you that scrapbook when I left for college. I thought you might be next, and unfortunately I was right.”

She knew. She had always known. She made you a scrapbook at seventeen because she understood, with terrible clarity, that you were going to need something to hold onto when they came for you too.

She was right. And she never stopped being your sister.

Based on Facebook correspondence, January 2010 – April 2020. Real names used in this private document.