When I was nine years old, I mulled over the last words of the last book in the Chronicles of Narnia, softly pushed the covers closed, sighed, and burst into tears. Not because the book ended sadly, although it had its sad moments, but because the book had ended. There were no more discoveries to be made in Narnia, and although it would stay with me for the rest of my life, the doors to its world had closed to me as surely as they had to the Pevensie children four books previously.

I feel much the same way now that I've finished the last Harry Potter book. There were sad moments, of course---I don't think that counts as a spoiler---but they're not really why I feel as though I need a good, long cry. It's wonderful that Harry's story is finished...but how horrible that I'll never get to visit him again. No more new spells to discover, no more Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes to laugh at, no more opportunities to wander Hogwarts, to solve wizarding mysteries, to creep around beneath an invisibility cloak. I'll miss it all and feel I'm mourning Harry Potter's world as much as I am those who've fallen in the course of the series.

That said, though... it's Snape's death that hurts the most. That terrible, fraught scene between Harry and Snape---more than Dumbledore's death---was what made me cry at the end of HBP, precisely because I suspected what Rowling revealed in this book. I knew it couldn't end any other way, but oh, how I wished it might....

I hope your afterlife is a good one, Severus Snape.

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