J.K. Rowling

Chapter Two - Page 6

Unexpected Loss

When Rowling returned to Church Cottage to spend the Christmas holidays with her family, she was struck by her mother’s frail appearance. Anne Rowling was losing her battle with multiple sclerosis. “Her mobility was very limited; she looked ill, very ill—which I'd never really seen before. She was absolutely exhausted.”  Even so, Rowling did not grasp the seriousness of her mother’s condition.

On Christmas Eve, Rowling said good-bye to her parents and left to spend the remainder of the holidays with her boyfriend and his family. It was “the first time I had ever spent Christmas away from home,” she recalls. A week later, she was celebrating New Year’s Eve with her boyfriend and his family. “I had gone to bed early, ostensibly to watch The Man Who Would Be King, but instead I started writing,”  Rowling later told Geordi Greig of Tatler magazine. She worked on the novel a long time before going to sleep. The next morning, she was awakened by a phone call:

Dad called me at seven o'clock the next morning and I just knew what had happened before he spoke. I just knew. There was no way my father would call me at 7AM for any reason other than that. As I ran downstairs I had that kind of white-noise panic in my head but could not grasp the enormity of my mother having died.

Rowling and her boyfriend immediately got in a car and drove back to Tutshill. “I was alternately a wreck and then in total denial,” Rowling remembers. “At some point on the car journey I can remember thinking, 'Let's pretend it hasn't happened,' because that was a way to get through the next 10 minutes.”

Rowling blamed herself for not noticing that her mother was near death. If she had been more sensitive to her mother’s condition, she might not have left to spend New Year’s with her boyfriend. “I had no idea that MS would hit her so quickly,” she later admitted. “And I wasn't there. That stirs up such guilt.”
If she could live her mother’s last week over again, she would have told her about her new novel. “I know I was writing Harry Potter at the moment my mother died,” Rowling recalls. “I had never told her about Harry Potter.”

The unexpected death of her mother had a profound effect Rowling and on the book she was writing. “Her death depth-charged me,” the author later observed. “It changed my life.”  The loss infused Rowling’s novels with new seriousness, depth, and power. Had her mother lived, the books might have taken a different direction. Without the lurking presence of death, they might have lacked emotional impact. In that sense, Anne Rowling’s death was her final gift to her daughter. Her death brought Harry Potter to life.

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