Today Evanna Lynch told the world that J.K. Rowling helped her recover from anorexia. The Toronto Sun reports that she composed a letter to Rowling to thank her for the books, which gave her hope, and particularly to thank her for the character of Luna Lovegood, who inspired her. Rowling wrote back, encouraging the young teen to be brave and to audition for the role of Luna, her favorite character, in order to fulfill her dream of being in the movies. But to do that, Evanna Lynch needed to recover. So recover she did, and she later landed the part.

As I read this story today, I considered how Lynch was not the only person whose personal and professional life was transformed by the Harry Potter series. When I prepared to teach the Christian Theology and Harry Potter seminar at Yale in 2008, I hoped to give students tools to analyze whether the series supported a Christian worldview. I wanted them to learn technical terms like “eschatology” and “consubstantiation;” I hoped they might absorb the basics of sacrificial history; and if they could understand how J.K. Rowling handled the problem of evil, then I would have done my job.

But by the time the course began, I had developed a learning goal not for my students, but for me. In the months between when I proposed the course and its first meeting, my father was diagnosed with Primary Lateral Sclerosis (PLS), a degenerative neural illness similar to multiple sclerosis or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. While the trajectory differs from person to person, in my father’s case first his legs, then his facial muscles, and now his hands have slowly become paralyzed. There is no treatment for this illness, just the slow stopping of the body, though the mind remains intact.

Because I knew that J.K. Rowling wrote the Harry Potter series in response to her mother’s struggle with multiple sclerosis, I wanted to see what wisdom her books held for me as a daughter facing a similar situation. Did she have an antidote to the fear that comes with thinking about a parent’s long-term care? A potion that could help the sickening feeling I got in the pit of my stomach when I considered how much my dad had lost because of his ailing body and how much my mom had given up to care for him? Did she have a bezoar that might cure the dread I felt when I thought of the progress of my dad’s illness and worse yet, life without him?

I read the books searching, scouring for answers to these questions, or at least for a glimmer of hope. And, when I completed the series, this is what I found: First, Rowling doesn’t make death easy for her reader. Harry Potter struggles throughout the series with the loss of his parents—when he stares into the Mirror of Erised, he sees what he most wants, namely a living mother and father. When Dementors assault him, he relives the night his parents died and feels helpless as he hears their screams. As a result, he has a hard time producing the Patronus charm—which protects against the Dementors—because that would prevent him from hearing his parents’ voices. It seems that he yearns for his any trace of his parents’ existence, even at the cost of his own safety.

But if Rowling shies away from magic potion solutions, she does offer hope. Rowling writes that it is not what we suffer that matters, but how each of us responds to suffering that ultimately transforms it. In the face of pain and death, each of us is given this choice: like Voldemort, we can isolate ourselves, fueled by the knowledge that it is only because we love that death hurts us at all. Or we can choose a different path, a rockier, muddier way. We can, like Harry, hold fast to friendships that are stronger than any tool death uses as a weapon. We can let love offer a protection that, like the shield of a solid Patronus, buffers against defeat, all the while knowing that it cannot prevent death from leaving irrevocable scars.

Rowling did precisely that in her writing. When I finished book rereading the series, I stared at a massive tome—4063 pages in total—and there was something consoling about it. Here was the witness of someone who’d made the choice to respond to death with empathy and support for others. Here was a writer who had taken her experiences and used them to comfort readers she would never meet. In that way, her writing mirrored Harry’s actions. She, like Harry, offered friendship and love, and by so doing, ensured that her readers—like members of the wizarding world—would never have to suffer alone.

Looking at an illness that will continue to compromise my father’s health, I see the situation in a new way. The devastation of my father’s sickness is still very real. Like Voldemort, it would be easy to choose denial and isolation, to let anger, doubt, and fear take control. But I try to choose differently, and I have done so every day for the past two years. Like Harry and Rowling, I do my best to choose love as my weapon against death—I choose to cast a metaphorical Patronus, powered by the happiest memories I have of my family. I choose to keep my friends—and, dare I admit it, a few good books—close by. These things, I believe, will be enough.

As the semester closed and my students prepared their final papers on Augustinian sin or Irenaean soul-making theodicy, they had hopefully learned the material they needed to know. And I, too, had achieved my learning goal. I made my choice: I may not be able to keep death from leaving its mark, but as long as I choose to rely on love and friendship, there will always be a Patronus of hope.