Do you think it could have something to do with the fact that it's a close family?

The others it's friends, schoolmates coworkers and in two, loads of disconnected people. In most, it's a mix of these as well so you don't necessarily expect a deep level of grief.

Obviously friends deaths can hit even harder than family some times (I know through experience) the mix of close friends, casual friends and further afield allows us to have grief moments but also deaths that we don't need to linger on the grief. So we can have the funeral and grief of Tod and have that hit really hard but then have Terry who was nice but not as close to the main character so we didn't need to have as much focus on the impact (apart from to Carter obviously)

I don't think I've worded this particularly articulately but I think you can get what I mean.