I just returned from watching the last Harry Potter Film - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II.  It's strange to watch as an era of your life ends.  Like so many others, I grew up with these books.  I felt I was a part of them.  I grew up alongside Ron, Harry, and Hermione feeling their struggles, sorrowing in their tragedies, and rejoicing in their triumphs as they encountered them.  And Professor Dumbledore seemed as much my tutor as he was theirs.

To say that I loved those three is hardly worth mentioning.  Who doesn't?  But there is another character who I think shines above them all in his complexity and ability to teach.  And that would be Severus Snape.  Of all of JK Rowling's characters, there is not another so intricate.  The books and the films give us a beautiful sense of this complexity.  At times we see the dreaded potions master and hate him and at others we stand in awe at the bravery of a man who defied Voldemort at every turn.  Here we have a man who lived surrounded by hate - a man who hated himself for his own wrongdoings and carried himself in a shadow that only revealed the parts of him so easily hated by others - but who shone brilliantly internally.

But that really is the lesson of these books.  No matter who we are, where we come from, how we are perceived, or how we are raised it is our choices that define us.  So to give tribute to Snape and to these books I find it best to conclude with some of the words that have given life to one of the most wonderful stories of our time that have helped to raise me throughout my childhood.

"Hogwarts was the first and best home he had known. He and Voldemort and Snape, the abandoned boys, had all found home here."

"Do not pity the dead, Harry, pity the living. Above all pity those who live without love. By returning you may ensure that fewer souls are maimed and fewer families are torn apart. If that seems to you a worthy goal, then we say goodbye for the present." -Albus Dumbledore

"The scar had not pained Harry for nineteen years. All was well."