I have made peace with most of the endings in Harry Potter. I have accepted Fred. I have accepted Lupin and Tonks, even though that one still sits in my chest like a small unhealed bruise. I have accepted Sirius falling through the veil in a way that felt too quick and too quiet for someone who deserved so much more. I have made my peace with all of it, the way you make peace with things you cannot change but never fully stop grieving.
But Snape. Snape I have not made peace with. And the older I get and the more I sit with this story, the more I believe that his ending, specifically the absence of any real resolution between him and Harry, is the one genuine wound in an otherwise extraordinarily complete piece of storytelling.
Let me tell you why it keeps bothering me.
What We Found Out and What It Cost
The Prince’s Tale is one of the most stunning chapters Rowling ever wrote. Sitting inside Snape’s memories, watching his entire life unspool in reverse, understanding in the space of a few pages that everything we thought we knew about this man was incomplete, it is a breathtaking piece of writing. The boy who loved Lily Evans before he fully understood what love was. The choice that cost him everything. The decades of grief worn as cruelty because he did not know another way to carry it. The quiet, devastating loyalty that never wavered even when no one was watching and no one would ever know.
Harry goes into that pensieve and comes out a completely different person in relation to Snape. He understands now. He finally, fully understands. And what does he do with that understanding? He names his son after him. He carries it forward into the rest of his life as a kind of private honoring.
But Snape never knows any of that. He dies on the floor of the Shrieking Shack looking into Harry’s eyes, trying to give him the memories, and that is it. That is where it ends for him. In pain and alone and still not knowing whether any of it meant anything to the boy he spent seventeen years protecting for reasons that had nothing to do with the boy himself and everything to do with the woman he lost.
That asymmetry is what I cannot let go of. Harry gets the revelation. Snape gets nothing.
The Resurrection Stone Should Have Had Five Names
When Harry uses the resurrection stone in the forest, four people come to him. James. Lily. Sirius. Remus. His parents and his godfathers, the people who loved him most directly and most personally. And it is a beautiful scene, genuinely one of the most moving in the entire series. He is walking toward his own death and they walk with him and it is exactly right.
But I have thought about this scene so many times since and I cannot stop wondering why Snape was not the fifth.
Not instead of any of the others. Alongside them. Because by that point Harry knows the truth. He has just watched Snape’s entire life in that pensieve. He knows that this man, who he hated with a genuine and not entirely unjustified passion for six years, died for him. Died for his mother. Died carrying a grief so enormous and so private that he never once allowed himself the relief of being understood.
Imagine Snape appearing in that clearing. Not the Snape of the dungeon and the sneer and the cutting remarks, but the Snape of the memories. The real one. And imagine Harry being able to say, even just with the way he looked at him, I know now. I understand. It meant something.
Even that small moment would have been enough. It would have closed something that the story left achingly, almost unbearably open.
Or Give Us the Dumbledore Version
If the resurrection stone was too much to ask, then at minimum the limbo scene with Dumbledore set a precedent that Rowling simply did not follow through on with Snape, and I think that is a genuine missed opportunity.
Harry’s conversation with Dumbledore at King’s Cross is one of the most satisfying emotional beats in the entire series. It gives Harry, and the reader, a chance to ask the questions that have been building for years. To sit with someone who knew more than they let on and to finally, finally have an honest conversation. There is resolution there. There is tenderness. There is the particular relief of understanding.
Snape deserved that scene. Harry deserved that scene with Snape. Not instead of Dumbledore, but in addition to him. A moment somewhere in that white liminal space where the two of them could have existed outside of the roles they had been locked into for so long. Outside of professor and student, outside of the mission and the pretense and the mutual mistrust that was always partly real and partly performance.
A scene where Harry could say I saw everything and Snape could say I know you did and both of them could finally stand in the full truth of what passed between them without any of the noise that surrounded it while they were both alive.
That scene would have been one of the greatest in the series. And we never got it.
But Here Is What I Really Wish
More than the resurrection stone moment. More than the limbo scene. What I genuinely, deeply wish is that Snape had lived.
I know that is not how the story goes. I know his death serves a narrative purpose, that there is something thematically complete about him dying still unknown, still unacknowledged, with his secret intact until Harry chooses to look. I understand the literary logic of it.
But the heart does not always care about literary logic.
Snape is the only significant relationship in Harry’s life that never gets to be resolved in the living world. Every other complicated relationship finds some form of completion. Dumbledore gets King’s Cross. The Weasleys get each other. Even Draco gets a moment of not quite redemption but at least ambiguity, a hesitation that suggests something shifted in him. But Snape and Harry never get to stand across from each other as two people who finally see each other clearly and decide what to do with that.
Think about what a living Snape would have meant. The most uncomfortable, most challenging, most genuinely unresolved relationship in Harry’s life would have had to become something new. They would have had to figure out how to exist in the same world now that the pretense was gone, now that Harry knew everything and Snape knew that Harry knew. There is no more mission to hide behind. No more role to perform. Just two people with an extraordinarily complicated history trying to work out what they are to each other on the other side of a war.
That story would have been so rich and so difficult and so deeply human. The awkward dinners at the Weasleys where Snape inevitably says something cutting and everyone holds their breath. The moment Harry tries to thank him properly and neither of them knows what to do with the weight of it. The slow, uncomfortable, entirely imperfect process of two people who have every reason to misunderstand each other trying, despite all of that, to do better.
We were robbed of that story. And I think it is the only place where the ending of Harry Potter feels genuinely incomplete to me.
What Snape Deserved
He deserved to be known while he was still alive to feel it. That is the simplest way I can put it.
He spent his entire adult life carrying something that no one around him understood, playing a role that required him to be despised by the very people he was protecting, unable to explain himself, unable to ask for comfort, unable to be seen as anything other than what the mission required him to appear to be. That is an almost incomprehensible kind of loneliness. And he bore it completely, faithfully, until the very end.
The least the story could have given him was a moment of being truly known by Harry Potter. Not just mourned. Not just named as a tribute on a child born years after his death. Actually known, in the room, in the flesh, by the boy whose survival his entire hidden life had been organized around.
Harry naming his son Albus Severus is beautiful. It is genuinely moving. But it is also, if I am being completely honest, a memorial. And Snape deserved more than a memorial.
He deserved the conversation. He deserved the look in Harry’s eyes that said I understand now, all of it, and it mattered. He deserved to know that the life he gave, the choices he made in grief and guilt and stubborn, private love, that all of it landed somewhere real.
He deserved to be alive enough to receive that.
And the fact that he wasn’t is, for me, the one thing in this extraordinary story that I will never entirely stop wishing had gone differently.
PS: this post is written for the movie Snape. Book Snape was actually pretty cruel. Or maybe it’s just Alan Rickman who added the depth to the character but it’s shown in books that Lily made her distance from him after he called her mudblood while movies show Lily simply chose James over him.
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