The importance of death /Harry and Cedric

[Ceridwen]

No: HPFGUIDX 147302

Sherry:
> 
> Sorry, Lupinlore, I have to disagree as well, and you know, I 
almost always
> agree with your take on things.  But being a very private griever, 
i felt
> Harry's grief for Sirius was absolutely convincing.  When my dad 
died eight
> years ago, if you didn't know me well, you might not have thought 
it touched
> me much.  I never spoke of it, not even to my sister and brothers 
or my best
> friends.  I still rarely speak of my dad.  alone, i spent many 
sleepless
> nights, many agonizing aching days, doing my job, going about my 
life and
> feeling totally torn apart inside.  But nobody would have known, 
and people
> might even have said that I was taking it very well.

Ceridwen:
I'm a private griever, too.  I lost my father right before I turned 
sixteen, so I was even at about the same age as Harry was when he 
lost Sirius.  One completely insensitive woman at our church (the 
pastor's wife!) actually told my mother that I 'wasn't too upset' 
over my father's death.  As if she knew me!  We had plenty of time to 
figure out he was going to die, he had been in and out of the 
hospital for the past year.  But when it happens, after thinking it 
will but it doesn't for so long, it's a complete shock, and only then 
is the reality brought home.  I grieved.  And it took years to stop 
thinking I could tell him something.  But I didn't think it was 
anybody else's business.  In fact, sharing it with anyone who wasn't 
***extremely*** close (my mother, who was going through an equivalent 
time, not even my best friends) seemed like a profane lessening of 
the magnitude of the loss.

Sherry:
> Some things are too deep and painful to explode over, and Harry is 
> more the type to pull his sorrow into himself.
> 
> as for Harry's grief over Cedric, I think that was a combination of 
things.
> i don't think it was just Cedric.  He'd been betrayed by someone 
he'd
> trusted.  He'd see Voldemort return to his body, been tortured and 
mocked
> and slashed with a knife; he'd seen the echoes of his parents; and 
Cedric's
> only reason for being there was that he and Harry decided to take 
the
> tri-wizard cup together.  On top of that, he had fudge's disbelief 
in the
> hospital wing, and then the abrupt return to the Dursleys, where 
noone from
> the WW bothered to keep in touch with news and information.  He felt
> completely abandoned by everyone.  I think all of that put together 
is why
> his grief over Cedric seems so out of proportion when compared to 
his grief
> for Sirius.  But that grief for Sirius rang more true for me than 
almost any
> of Harry's other emotional reactions in the past.

Ceridwen:
And, as someone else pointed out, this was his first remembered 
exposure to a dead body; Cedric was near Harry's age; Harry was 
already emotionally on the edge as Sherry points out; somebody else 
mentions that he also has to bring the body back to the Diggorys 
which will be emotional in itself as he feels their grief; Cedric 
isn't as close as Sirius, so the profanity of sharing the loss will 
not be as great.

And, he is trying to come to terms with his own possible involvement 
without the potential of putting it off onto someone else.  He has an 
outright villian in Crouch!Moody, so there is no secret culpability 
that he can imagine and/or latch onto.  It's in the open.  So he has 
to wonder what he might have done to supplement that (sharing the 
trophy).  And, it's his first experience with death and its 
associated guilt.  By the time Sirius dies, he has begun to learn how 
to place the blame so he isn't so internally tortured by the 'what-
ifs' of his own actions.

He still has more steps to take, IMO.  The true reason Cedric and 
Sirius died is because Voldemort wants to take over the WW.  That's 
the root reason why they both died.  Sharing the trophy was a noble 
gesture.  If it hadn't been for Voldemort's plan, it would have been 
a stunning example of teamwork.  Snape and Sirius had been taunting 
each other and worse for years.  If Voldemort hadn't planned to get 
Harry to the MoM, they might still be taunting each other, Sirius 
alive, everything as it was.  Perhaps his blame placing has something 
to do with not being ready quite yet, as of the beginning of HBP, to 
face the magnitude of Voldemort's evil presence, and his own future 
role in stopping him?

Ceridwen.