31.08.1998
The room was dark. She sat down on the bed. She was cold. She wished she wasn't alone. It was all over.
Through the gap between the curtains, a ray of shimmering, silvery moonlight filtered into the room. As the only source of light, it formed a trail from the window sill, across the stone tiled floor in front of the white-covered four-poster bed, over the piano stool, the piano, over the stone-panelled wall to the door frame, also made of stone. Crossing half the room from left to right, it showed the dust in the air of the unventilated room.
The walls of the room were high and dark, but the photographs and paintings that hung on them in some places gave the tower room the warm impression of an inhabited place. Most of the photos hung in the corner above the black piano, and the frame of the outermost photo was shimmering in the moonlight. It was a black and white photo of five people. Parents and three children - a family.
The magical paintings were hung higher under the ceiling. One was above the chest of drawers next to the bed, the second on the wall opposite, above the door frame. Another picture, no doubt painted by a child, hung in the far corner of the room, above a cupboard which, together with the cooker underneath, formed something like a small kitchen. In front of it was a small table made of black stone, just big enough for one person to eat at. To the right of the table was a large wardrobe with the words "Prof M. McGonagall - Transfiguration" engraved on the doors.
The door between the wardrobe and the piano was opened, revealing a winding staircase that led downwards and was lost in the darkness.
Minerva looked around briefly after entering and immediately sat down on the bed, exhausted. It was all over. She sat there and stared ahead of her. Without even knowing what she was looking at, she let her gaze glide over the stone walls of the room. This was her room. No, this had been her room, she didn't know exactly where she would live now as headmistress, maybe she could stay there, maybe not. All she knew was that it was all over, she could start something new in her life or try to carry on with her life as before. She still had the night to think about it, tomorrow she would have to make decisions again, but now she had ten hours to herself. Now that it was over, she had time.
She finally had time. Time to sleep meant time to think, time to mourn, time to cry. Because she wanted to cry, but no tears came. After months in which she simply had to function, in which she had to take responsibility again and again for things that she had never fully understood herself, after all the losses and defeats, after all the dark places, the abysses she had been in, in which she could have started crying immediately at any time, no more tears came to her now. But now she wanted to cry, she tried with all her might, she rubbed her eyes, squeezed the crying out of her, but her voice failed after a short time, the tears didn't come. And so she sat there, for minutes or perhaps for hours, crying silently without tears, because she couldn't help it - it was all over.
She had been waiting for this moment, but never would she have thought that she would be completely alone at the point when it finally came. Six months ago, she couldn't have imagined that the war would end any time soon, but she had naively visualised the end as a grand and, above all, celebratory finale. She had hoped for light, laughter singing and fireworks. It should have been her celebration. And it had come, a small celebration at the end of a long struggle, a tedious ongoing fight, but it had been far too short and full of exhaustion. She hadn't really noticed the moment when her name was called and everyone applauded, as she had been busy trying not to cry out in pain. She hadn't been able to clearly distinguish which pain was physical and which was emotional. The end had not turned out the way she had expected, and whether it was a good end, she did not know. What was the Order of Merlin First Class worth if she had received it for her role in the war, a war that should never have happened in the first place?
On the surface, she did feel better now, everything seemed to be in order again, everything looked the way it should. Still, this year would never be forgotten, people had died. And sometimes, like now, she felt like she was the only one who had survived and was from now on alone in the world. Now that the castle was rebuilt, she wanted to grieve properly, although she had to figure out how to do that first. From her previous experience she was used to simply ignoring her feelings and pretending there was no grief for her.
Minerva looked at the photo on the wall. Her family smiled at her from the picture. Her father, who was a Muggle, had died of cancer decades ago. It had been the first death in her family that she could remember well. Instead of taking time off afterwards like her brothers, she had immediately returned to Hogwarts to work.
Her brothers had both died in the Wizarding War, so taking time off at that time had been out of the question. Robert had died in the First Wizarding War when he was only twenty-five, and Malcolm in the Second War. He had been a healer in St Mungo's and was killed when he had insisted on continuing to treat a Muggle-born woman and not sending her to Azkaban. That had been a week after Voldemort had come to power. Laura and Anne, Malcolm's wife and daughter, both Muggles, had then fled to Canada, where Laura had relatives. Minerva looked at the child's drawing above the wardrobe. Anne had drawn it more than ten years ago. It was supposed to represent the entire McGonagall family.
Minerva's only living relative in the UK now was her mother, Isobel, who had severe dementia and lived in a care home in Edinburgh. She no longer recognised her daughter.
Minerva McGonagall wondered whether this time she needed more time to grieve. Because everyday life would quickly pull her back into her old patterns, except that these patterns wouldn't work this time. Tomorrow she would be asked who had to do what, but in her state of grief she would not want to answer and would prefer to simply do nothing, if she wanted to hide actual feelings. She believed she had had enough responsibility for her whole life, if she was to deal with it the way she had before.
She wanted to find a life that suited her new self, her new self that she had yet to understand; the last year had changed her too much.
How many selves had she had in her life up until this point? Her first self was Minnie, the vicar's daughter, the second - Minerva, the model student, prefect and head girl, or was that still the same as the first? Then came Professor McGonagall, the teacher and deputy headmistress. Disappointed by her muggle hometown and her first job at the Ministry, unsuccessful in love, the woman who only found fulfilment at Hogwarts. Was that true for over forty years of her life, or was there a difference between the forty-year-old Minerva who had deliberately chosen to be single and the sixty-year-old widowed Minerva?
She looked at her hands. She was still wearing her wedding ring, but only because it was not clearly recognisable as such, it was adorned with a small emerald and matched her clothing style.
Most of the changes in her life had been fluid, but this was different. She had experienced war before, but for the last year she had lived in a country ruled by Voldemort and taught at a school run by Death Eaters and therefore was not able to fight alongside the Order of the Phoenix. She had barely been able to protect her students from torture, while she had lost countless people close to her in a very short space of time.
Her sixty-third birthday was just over a month away, but she thought her hands looked like those of an eighty-year-old. But maybe that was just her usual exaggerated self-criticism.
Although she would never have admitted it to herself, Minerva had always known that the day she would become Headmistress of Hogwarts would come after the death of Albus Dumbledore. She had known him well enough to know that he would never have given up his job while he was still alive.
Now that day had come, earlier than expected but still a year too late. Not only was Dumbledore dead, but also other teachers, Remus Lupin, Charity Burbage and Severus Snape. Her good friend from the Order, Emmeline Vance, had died too, and her students, Lavender Brown and Colin Creevy. Fred Weasley and Nymphadora Tonks had already graduated from Hogwarts, but the time she had been teaching them felt like yesterday. And with Amelia Bones, Alastor Moody and Rufus Scrimgeour she had once worked at the Ministry.
How had it come to this, that so many had died? Minerva did know exactly how, because she had participated in the Battle of Hogwarts herself. It had been cruel. How absurd that sounded three months later: the Battle of Hogwarts. Hogwarts was a school, not a place that was allowed to become a battlefield. And yet the castle had been badly damaged in May. She and her colleagues had spent the whole summer repairing it. Certain parts of the school had to be rebuilt from scratch.
That was over now. The war was over. Everything was over. Gone but still omnipresent, so how was it possible that after all this a new school year would start tomorrow? A new school year at Hogwarts with her as headmistress - Minerva McGonagall. It was unimaginable. It had always been the goal of her career, but was it still her career? Was she still suitable for the job? Could she, who now wanted nothing more than time to grieve quietly, still make decisions for an entire school?
In the summer, she had still had a clear goal in mind - to get the castle back in it's original state so that lessons could take place normally again. She wanted to restore normality, and now that had been achieved. But how was she supposed to find her way around this apparent normality when the real normality had been lost, along with the many lives that the war had wiped out? Normality for Minerva McGonagall was a world in which emotions, especially grief, did not define everyday life despite all the losses. With every breath, with every heartbeat, she realised that this time there was no way for her to suppress her feelings.
The rays of moonlight had now disappeared and the room was plunged into complete darkness. Only the outlines of the curtains could still be seen.
How could the magical world find its way back to normality? In this dark room Minerva sat on her bed alone, but wasn't there a whole world outside that had lost friends and relatives? In ten hours, a new school year would begin, and this world would come to Hogwarts. Hundreds of students who had also lost loved ones. A normality would come, that these losses were a part of. This time, Minerva was one of many who were grieving. Despite her tiredness, it became clear to her.
With a little optimism, things could work out tomorrow, she thought. Still, she was uncomfortable imagining how she would greet the assembled school without pretending that the impact of Second Wizarding War did not matter. What was the best way to talk about it? She had already written three versions of the welcome speech today, tomorrow she would write a fourth. She wasn't as good at giving speeches as Albus Dumbledore, but she knew way better than him how to prepare for such an event.
So tomorrow she would stand in the great hall and give a speech that would address the current situation, this elusive "new normality". Would she be able to do this without tears in her eyes? And if not, would that be a bad thing? Some of the things she had been through in recent years were visible without tears, she had no doubt. Two years ago, her hair had still been black, now it had gone almost completely grey.
Would the others understand that she was finding this speech difficult? Such mutual empathy had only ever played a role in her life when she had been repeatedly called unempathetic. Was now the time to change that? Mutual empathy - that sounded almost too good to be achievable. She knew how to console a crying first-year student, but now she would have to go a step further.
She would have to start with herself. If she couldn't suppress her feelings this time, she had to learn to share them. She wished she wasn't alone, and she wasn't. For that reason, she couldn't close herself off from the world. Everyone around her had gone through the same thing as she had, Minerva just had to take the first step towards them. She had worked at Hogwarts for over forty years and had spent just as long making sure that no one dared to take a step towards her. Minerva McGonagall took a deep breath. Now that the war was over and she was the Headmistress, she would change that.
The room was dark. She felt warm now. She knew she wasn't alone. It was all over.