Snape Quote of the Week #28

  He did not know why he was doing it, why he was approaching the dying man: He did not know what he felt as he saw Snape's white face, and the fingers trying to staunch the bloody wound at his neck. Harry took off the invisibility cloak and looked down upon the man he hated, whose widening eyes found Harry as he tried to speak. Harry bent over him, and Snape seize the front of his robes and pulled him close.
  A terrible rasping, gurgling noise came from Snape's throat.
  "Take... it.... Take... it...."
  Something more than blood was leaking from Snape. Silvery blue, neither gas nor liquid, it gushed from his mouth and his ears and his eyes, and Harry knew what it was, but did not know what to do--
  A flask, conjured from thin air, was thrust into his shaking hands by Hermione. Harry lifted the silvery substance into it with his wand. When the flask was full to the brim, and Snape looked as though there was no blood left in him, his grip on Harry's robes slackened.
  "Look... at... me...." he whispered.
  The green eyes found the black, but after a second, something in the depths of the dark pair seemed to vanish, leaving them fixed, blank, and empty. The hand holding Harry thudded to the floor, and Snape moved no more.
~Deathly Hallows, Ch. 32 "The Elder Wand"

First, I have to say that this quote was very difficult to bring myself to do. This is the scene where I cried more than I ever have in my entire life, and it never gets easier to read it. I was sobbing while reading it so I could type it down.

Besides that fact that Snape is dying in this part, it makes me choke up with sadness thinking about how painful his death must have been. And Sirius said that death was 'quicker and easier than falling asleep'... Well, that's easy for him to say--he was killed by a curtain. But to bleed to death from a wound in your neck caused by a poisonous snake whose fangs were long enough to pierce your trachea just seems like one of the worst deaths imaginable. Snape's death was not only the cruelest on us, but the cruelest on him.... He wasn't lucky enough to be killed painlessly by a flash of green light, no, he had to bleed to death.... Poor Severus.

Amidst the tears, I'm also wondering how Snape gave Harry his memories. Is that some sort of spell that you can learn, to wandlessly let your most significant memories flow out of all your facial orifices? Or was that just something J.K. Rowling included so the situation would make sense?

And then, of course, the end is the saddest thing in all of history. He wanted to see Lily's eyes one last time before he died.... But he must have found peace in the afterlife and reconciled with her. He just had to... and he's where he wants to be.