The importance of death

[lupinlore]

No: HPFGUIDX 147255

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "festuco" <vuurdame at x...> wrote:
>
.
> > 
> Wow, maybe you should talk to some parents who had their child
> murdered and some parents who's child had a Snapelike teacher. 

And what do the feelings of Cedric's parents have to do with 
anything?   The question, I recall, was whether Harry's suffering 
under Snape is not much less than Cedric's suffering for losing his 
life.  And the answer is that that is a nonsensical comparison, as 
Cedric is not suffering at all.  He's dead.  He's abiological.  His 
sensory and cognitive processes are defunct.  He's no longer among 
the existing.  Sorry about that, but it's the way the story went.  
Therefore he has no status as suffering at all.  Did his parents 
suffer a great loss?  Sure.  But that is totally irrelevant to the 
way things were phrased.

It is true, however, and this may be what you are getting at, that I 
don't share JKR's death neurosis.  She said, in her last interview, 
that the worst thing she could think of was someone she loves dying.  
I can think of many worse things than that, and have suffered several 
of them (as well as having several loved ones die).  I'm afraid that 
people dying is a fact of life, and although it is a sad and 
unfortunate fact, I don't understand or really empathize with her 
intense fear and horror of it.  Sorry.  Nor is she correct when she 
says that she thinks everyone shares the intense fear of death.  Many 
people don't.  Now, we have to make a distinction between the FACT of 
death, which I think many people don't particularly fear, and the 
PROCESS of death, which is often intensely painful and difficult and 
which I think it is probably true everyone fears.

That is probably part of the problem I have with OOTP and GoF.  I 
just don't buy that Harry would be so affected by the death of a 
classmate he hardly knew, for one thing.  True, there are a lot of 
other circumstances surrounding that death that were traumatic, and 
which I could see affecting Harry in the way she displayed, but those 
aren't the things dwelled on in OOTP.  Rather it is the fact of 
Cedric's death, which, considering that Harry had already been the 
instrument of the death of Quirrel, hardly seemed cause for such 
emotional overkill.  And then she turns around and shows Harry hardly 
being affected by the death of a man around whom most of his familial 
fantasies revolved.  Illogical and unbelievable, all things 
considered.


Lupinlore