User blog comment:JoePlay/Wizarding World Giveaway/@comment-4195977-20110724163457

Less than a week until the last of the eight Harry Potter movies comes out. A song by Oliver Boyd and the Remembralls called "End of an Era" keeps playing in my head, waking me up nights. I'm turning magic wands today, sitting here writing with a pen that looks like a wand, 18 wands keeping company at my side at breakfast. Monday, I'll be at the library, talking with Jody, whom I love and who I met because of Harry, talking with people - all adults whom I've never met before - about the philosophical and literary world Jo Rowling created. Thursday, my younger daughter Sara, my friend Peggy, Sara's boyfriend David, and my older daughter Keo will line up to see the midnight showing of the last movie... the end of an era that connected us with millions around the world, and connected us so much more strongly to each other than would otherwise have been.

This week, a four-month, online roleplay, masterfully mediated by Xavier and Amy and involving over 2000 players from literally every corner of the globe came to an end with Harry's sacrifice and Tom Riddle's demise. We are bereft.

What has this all meant to me?

It saved my daughter's life - I'm sure of it. It gave her something to cling to when friends went bad and hearts were broken and death surrounded her. It gave her something to live for as she battled depression - the next movie, the next book... It taught her to hope and to dream. It gave her alternatives as she chased or was chased by her own dementors, her own boggarts.

This is Harry's and Jo Rowling's biggest gift to me - that my daughter made it through the darkest days of her childhood and adolescence. Harry and Jo helped Sara find her voice. She's poetic, but it was, at least in part, Jo's prose that roused the sleeping literary muse within her. It's no accident that she started writing the year she found Harry.

She found Harry and brought him to me. It took a while - and it took Lord of the Rings and Peter Jackson to do it - an exchange of gifts, if you will between generations. While Anne McCaffrey had given us Pern and dragons, and Star Trek had given us the universe and the hope for a better future, the fact that Sara brought Harry to me, had something to offer me... to convince me of... made us equals despite the 37 years that separated me from her 10 year old self... indebted me to her. And this gave us a path back to each other when we were in danger of losing our bond. It saved us, let us love each other again.

I might have lost my sister, too, to despair, were it not for Harry, were I not inspired by him to turn some wands - to give to Sara and the friends who encouraged me to get to know the wizard they had fallen in love with. I'd never have taught my sister to turn, she'd not have had the reason she has now to get up in the morning, to put aside her sense of failure at the end of her career, and to create something beautiful... a passion in her life, unexpected and joyful.

This is what Harry has done for us - shown us a way out of despair, brought us together, reminded us of who we are.

So here we are - at a sort of end. No more midnight lines for the next book, so eager to take the train back to Hogwarts, to hug our favorite professors, to tweak Snape and elude Peeve and break the rules for curiosity's sake and, along with Harry, to save the world for the ones we love. No more midnight lines for movies - to grow up with Dan and Rupert and Emma, to hope Alan is still the Snape we love to hate and love to love, to love and obey Professor McGonnagal and to dispute the interpretation, how the filmmaker's story differed from the story in our heads, and our hearts... to hope and fear and laugh and love, not just with the characters in the books, but with the people who brought it to life for us on screen.

I'm grateful. To say I am grateful to all of you, to all of them, for all of the last ten years does not begin to cover it. Harry has changed me, changed my life, saved me in a way, saved people I love, his sacrifice protecting us from harm as surely as he protected Molly, Ginny, Neville and all those he loved.

I've been crying all week - losing the MiM experience; the books - done; the last movie about to open; Emma, Rupert and Dan about to finally say goodbye to Hermione, Ron and Harry, to each other, to Jo, to us after all these years. As Oliver Boyd sings, it will never be the same.

The chill blackness of loss that is the threat of a dementor's kiss threatens to overwhelm me.

But wait - there's Ron, vomiting slugs into a bucket in Hagrid's hut. And Hermione unpetrified. And Harry saying, "There's no need to call me 'sir', Professor." And Snape pulling up his sleeves to knock heads together. And Hagrid showing up at our door with a squashed cake with the words Happee Birthday, Harry on it. And our letter... And I solemnly swear that I am up to no good. As Oliver and the Remembralls say, though it's no where I have been, I'll keep on smiling, for the times I had... with them.

That's it. Think of happy things, happy memories, things we've all shared, the love this has brought into your life. Is it real? Of course it is happening online, in the pages of a book, in a movie studio and on a set... with people you have not met, many of whom you never will - in person. Of course it's happening in your head... but it is no less real for that.

So come on, now. Think of happy things. And say it with me - with Luna and Seamus and Dean and Harry and Ron and Hermione and Jo.

EXPECTO PATRONUM!