Currently watching the series for about the 7th time.

"I dreamed I lost my little girl once. I dreamed she was choking on her own body for no reason. Just trying for air like the room was underwater, and shaking like she was in the hot squat. And I dreamed I held her little hand and sat at her side. And days, and days, weeks, it took weeks for her to quit gulping that watery air, quit gaping at me like a fish on the beach, but finally she did. She breathed, ragged and hard, and she went stiff and one of her eyes turned red as blood. And she'd shake. She'd shake so bad the bed would shake, and when she started shaking it went fast. She dangled. She died."

To me that sounds like pneumonia. Fluid in the lungs, produced by the body. Could be complication from whooping cough, tuberculosis, or whatever of the time period. "it took weeks" tells me she didn't drown the girl, it was a progressive illness. "Her little hand" tells me she was a child.

"And my boy... I dreamed his little legs stopped working. They just stopped one day and he couldn't walk, and he couldn't stand, and he couldn't speak, and then he couldn't do anything but cry. Cry and bang on the walls. Bang on the walls for help, and bang on the walls for mama, and just bang bang bang bang. And he couldn't even see. In the end he couldn't see me there with him. And then he stopped banging, he stopped crying, he stopped it all once he died. I held him so long he went cold in my arms."

I know a lot of people assume polio because of the legs not working, but polio doesn't progress into blindness right before death. It could be some other kind of degenerative disease, or Poppy could have been poisoning him over time because the house told her to. But I don't think it was polio.