JKR's dealing with emotions - Talking about Death

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 147475

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, Kemper <iam.kemper at ...> wrote:

> The problem with Harry's coping of Sirius' death isn't that long,
> Shakespearean soliloquies are absent from the text, it's that Harry isn't
> shown waking with a tear-soaked pillow or something similar to show the
> reader the depth of Harry's loss and how he was hurting silently.  All JKR
> had to write was a short, simple sentence and it would have been
> clear.   But we didn't get that, we got some movie version of macho
> man-child, stiff upper-lip, "Sirius wouldn't want blahblah..." soliloquy
> that left the reader emotionally unsatisfied.

Pippin:
But immediately before that passage which  makes some
people feel that Harry's grief  is brushed aside, we get this:

"He could tell that Dumbledore understood, that he might even
suspect that until his letter arrived, Harry had spent nearly all
his time at the Dursley's lying on his bed, refusing meals, and
staring at the misted window, full of the chill emptiness that
he had come to associate with dementors." -HBP  ch4

So  while Harry was telling himself that Sirius wouldn't
want him to shut himself away or crack up, that is exactly what
Harry was doing, feeling as if dementors were around and 
making it even worse by telling himself he was failing Sirius.

But it did make a difference, I think,  that when Dumbledore 
came to get him, Harry saw that there were people he
needed to be strong for. There was a job he had to do.

Of course not everyone is able to be strong just because 
someone needs them to be, but Harry is. We certainly
have characters who failed when someone needed them,
so it's not like Rowling is ignoring the possibility. Not only
Merope, of course, but Sirius himself --weren't we all a 
little disappointed in Sirius that he wasn't able 
to be strong for Harry when Harry needed him in OOP?  

Perhaps the lack of memorial was another failure on Sirius's
part. He was always a rebel, according to JKR. We know that
he left a will, so perhaps he instructed that there should not
be any ceremony. Maybe he thought his friends did not 
deserve to mourn him -- they had forgotten him while he
was alive in Azkaban, so let them forget him in death.

Pippin