That Sinking Feeling

NOTE: Spoilers ahead! If you haven't read the entire Harry Potter series, like you should've, then please do not go on.

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Recently, I completed savouring the first Kate Morton novel, The House at Riverton also known as The Shifting Fog. No, this is not going to be a book review. I just felt the need to express what I've been feeling since I finished the book.
Funnily enough, I felt this same way after I finished reading her other book titled The Forgotten Garden. The only other times I have felt this way, were after I read Yann Martel's Life of Pi and Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake.

Let me first attempt at a description of this feeling I've been going on about.
Its a strange sinking feeling...something I feel when I think I'm going to win a competition and then find out I was nowhere close to getting a trophy...when I'm running to catch a train and miss it by a few microseconds...when I say something tactless to someone without realising it even though someone else had previously warned me and I didn't comprehend what they were saying.

Although each of these books have a seemingly happy ending, there is something amiss for me, something unsettling. I've been thinking a lot about this. What is the common thread running through these different tales? What could possibly have caused me to feel so sad?

And then I realised that the answer was pretty simple. It was loss. Loss of a loved one, loss of a life the character could've had, loss caused by a small unfortunate trigger, loss caused by something preventable.

Why should the character have loved and lost? Why should he/she have such a depressing life? Why did that other character not reveal the truth a little earlier? Why? Why? Why?

But of course there is another thread running through the veins of these books: hope. Simple, unadulterated hope that gave birth to courage, strength and the will to move on. Unfortunately, this was not the case with all the characters I've felt for...isn't that, then, what we call life? Isn't this what we should learn from? To love, lose and move on...to embrace the changes you didn't expect...to forgive and forget...as hard as they all may be.

You must think me a sap, crying like this about the loss of fictional characters! But I don't always end up like this, I assure you. I certainly didn't cry when poor Sirius Black fell through the Veil. I did feel bad when Dumbledore died but I don't remember feeling this way. I don't feel depressed when a favourite Agatha Christie character ends up being murdered next...I experience some sadness yes, but not the kind that lasts longer than an hour.

I guess Kate Morton, Yann Martel and Jhumpa Lahiri just have that gift to make us feel for the characters so much that when they lose the various battles of life, we get a sinking feeling. Not that Agatha Christie's novels are not hard hitting. The main difference, I believe, is in the length of the book, which would allow for a more detailed description of the emotions experienced by the main characters in the other books.

*phew* I feel a little better getting this out of my system. I will still feel bad for a while but if I immerse myself in a nice P. G. Wodehouse novel now, I'm sure I'll be just fine!

Oh and apologies for the title. I couldn't come up with a clever one but methinks this one can make do for now, eh?

Till next time,
Jo