Sirius' death (was: Dept of Mysteries Veil Room)

[Nora Renka]

No: HPFGUIDX 114818


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "justcarol67" 
<justcarol67 at y...> wrote:

<snip>

> Carol, who thinks that learning to cope with Sirius's death is an
> important lesson for Harry, much more important than any 
> contribution the living Sirius made or could have made in helping 
> him grow up

Wow.  I think that's one of the *coldest* things I've seen anyone 
post on here lately.  Learning to deal with the death of the person 
he loved more than anyone (note, who Harry loved, regardless of how 
we feel about the character) is more important or beneficial than, 
perhaps, learning what it's like to build a relationship of trust and 
love, even when the person in question *is* unquestionably damaged?  
It's better to just say 'Oops, well, he was quite a mess, wasn't it?  
Better for everyone not to have to deal with him!' than to go through 
the more difficult *yet* ultimately more constructive project of 
trying to rebuild a damaged soul, of trying to deal with things and 
not make them go away?

If I may dip into an operatic comparison for a minute, Puccini's La 
Rondine, where the heroine leaves the hero at the end, is in many 
ways more a grownup opera than Verdi's La Traviata, which basically 
has the same plot--except she dies at the end.  I'm not saying that 
it's easy for Harry to deal with death, by no means, but in many ways 
death is actually the more convenient answer, plotwise.

Sirius gave Harry something that no one else in the series has, at 
least from Harry's POV--and when you're talking about emotions, each 
individual POV is all you have to go on.  To reduce that to an object 
lesson about death and mourning is to ignore those contributions.

-Nora adds, for the sake of being contrary: don't cite those 'good 
qualities' without the 'latent' qualifier