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Let's talk about how Cho cried in History of Magic (under Binns' slow drone), in bathroom stalls (Myrtle peeked and this was sometimes enough to startle Cho into wet giggles), in her four poster (silencing charms tossed up around her, but Marietta crept over anyway, rolled her eyes and gave her some chocolate), behind the greenhouses, in the Forest, over homework and letters home.
Cho cried and she survived Pansy Parkinson's cruel jabs about a dead boy. She wept and she passed all her classes, kept up with Quidditch, watched fairweather friends scatter in the cold wind. She got very good at wordlessly summoning tissues and she joined the DA against her parents' wishes.
They had told her to behave, begged her, ordered her, as the threatening darknesses of the world clung close even inside Hogwarts, and Cho walked out to the little pub in Hogsmeade and wrote her name down on Hermione's list.
I hope someone in the DA told Cho that she ought to have been in Gryffindor.
I hope she laughed at them, hard.
Integrity. Truth. Honor. Dedication. These were the tenets of her House, of the blue and the bronze, the eagle called raven (called nerd, called stuck-up, called so many things that were not their names). Bravery was only one way to be a hero.
I hope Luna drifted into Cho’s orbit and Cho into hers. I hope Luna sent paper airplanes over the bathroom stall when Cho was crying in there and took her out to see thestrals.
Maybe Cho squeaked at first sight of her first thestral, because of her mother’s horror stories, or simply because she wore her reactions on her sleeve. But I hope she froze herself before she ran. I hope Cho held her breath and let her heart calm down. I hope she thought they were beautiful, in the end, these bony creatures who only appear for the grieving.
They are not creatures of death, these skeletal horses and their sweet tempers. They are creatures of life. They are for the ones who have been left behind.
I hope Cho believed her when Luna touched a pinky to her cheek and told her solemnly that tears are gifts. “They feed blibbering grackles,” Luna explained, and told Cho how very generous of her it was to share so many.
Cho was one of the few DA members to produce a corporeal Patronus. Hers was a swan, an emblem of grace, of beauty, of lovers, a bird with dense muscle and a terrible temper who is romanticized to be sweet and useless. They'll mob you, swans do, if you get too close to their nests. They have teeth.
What sort of happy thought did it take to make a silver swan to defend her from bad dreams? Dementors are despair, they are grief, the kind of grief that steals your soul before it kills you.
Cho's was not that kind of grief. Hers was the grief of the living. She was flying and learning and loving and, yes, crying. Cedric was not. Her pretty world, at fifteen, had been shattered. It was darker than anyone had ever warned her of, but she was growing into it. She was growing up. Sometimes that takes tears.
Mourning is not selfless. We do not weep for the dead. We weep for the living--what could have been and the tragedy that is. We weep because our hearts are breaking. It is not selfless but neither are we. We are selves.
Cho built a shining Patronus out of old, warm days, with Cedric's last kiss but also her mother's soft hand on her forehead, meeting Marietta and her rolled eyes the first day on the train. She built it up with things from after the fall, too, because joy amid sorrow has a different taste: feeding thestrals with Luna and the day a bony foal had curled up in her lap; butterbeers with the DA, this shining band of kids who wanted to save people.
In the year after Cedric's death, Cho watched her old friendships fizzle away one by one. They disappeared, the friends who were here for her victories, her beauty, her conquests.
She kept losing games to Ginny Weasley, after all. Cho forgot to put on make-up some days (imagine!) because she knew she would smear it by noon. She wasn’t dating the most eligible bachelor of Hufflepuff anymore, but she was still holding hands with his ghost in so many ways.
So unsightly, so unseemly, for a pretty girl of over fifteen. How dare she blotch those beautiful cheeks. How dare she.
Friends dropped like fickle mayflies, but Marietta Edgecomb stayed, cynical and exhausted. Marietta fretted over letters from home and followed Cho to class, to whispering slumber parties, to Hogsmeade and Dumbledore’s Army.
Cho had been stumbling for a year, and Marietta had never let her fall alone. Cho would not shun her at the first sign of weakness.
Let's talk about how they tried to mark Marietta for the rest of her life, for betraying the DA, for caving under the threats of a woman in pink gone mad with power.
How dare Marietta not have their strength, or their circumstances? How dare Cho not drop her lovers and her friends when they let her down? How dare she stay strong in her convictions, and her emotions, too?
Dumbledore’s Army was supposed to be for the downtrodden, the frightened, to teach people who couldn’t fight for themselves how to wage war.
Well Marietta was frightened. She had a mother in the midst of a war zone. Dolores Umbridge dropped threats beside her pink-patterned china and smiled.
You would think that Harry Potter would understand, this boy from under the staircase. You think he would understand the terrors of not monsters under your bed but the smiling faces of the monsters in the kitchen's sunlight.
Bravery is a privilege. Bravery is a choice, but it is also a privilege, that strength, that certainty, that gift. Integrity is a choice and Cho Chang chose it, standing there and daring a second set of friends to drop her like a wet sock for having the audacity call for mercy for the soul of a frightened girl stuck between terrible choices.
SNEAK the pimples across Marietta's face screamed and Cho wanted to scream back child, because that's what they were, children playing at games too big for them. But they never would be big enough. None of us, not Dumbledore, not Harry Potter, not Marietta Edgecomb, is ever big enough for this shattering world. We just have to live in it and make our Patronuses grow strong.
Give me the story of Cho Chang, who fought for her world. Tell me how she smuggled Muggle-borns through her Diagon Alley apartment in that final year, while she manned the register at Flourish and Blotts with pro-Ministry pamphlets propped up on the counter.
Tell me how Death Eaters spotted her crying quietly on her lunch break and how they, too, thought this meant she was weak.
Tell me how when Hogwarts and the scarred remains of Dumbledore's Army sounded the call, Cho came. She moved back into the hidden passages of a home that had stopped loving her when she had stopped being impeccably beautiful.
Her children rose in Hogwarts's defense and Cho was among them, with the Stunning Charm that Harry had taught her and all the curses he had not. Maybe her cheeks were wet, maybe her hands shook when they came across Lavender's crumpled body, but she stood, this child of Ravenclaw, and she fought.
If anyone had called her brave, she would have laughed.
Tell me about Cho after the war, rebuilding the castle with tired hands and aching wands; Cho sitting with Parvati and letting her cry herself out over Lavender; sitting with Luna, who didn't cry at all, just wrote the names of the dead in sparkling light at their feet and hummed a little off-tune. Cho had a good spell for conjuring tissues and she taught it to anyone who needed it.
The curse on Marietta's face was more petty than Marietta's betrayal ever was. That curse was a child's tantrum when the world refused to be as black and white as Hermione wanted it to be, the good and the evil not broken up into straight lines.
There were only the scared and the rash, here, only the wise and the selfish. There were only children, really, all of them children trying to learn how to be grown. And Hermione, aching, furious, had tried to write out those stark lines of good and evil into Marietta's pretty face.
But they will meet again later: a Hermione who has seen Ron leave them in their worst hour, and a Cho who has seen a war in the stone halls she stopped calling blessed the day Cedric died.
They have fought the same war, because they have always been fighting the same war. Hermione is brave and Cho is honest, but Hermione has got wisdom tucked under her tongue and Cho has hard-earned nerve in the pit of her stomach. They have a place to meet on this old battlefield.
Tell me about Hermione, her arm carved with Bellatrix's mudblood, coming to find her and Marietta. Tell me about how Hermione healed the curse on Marietta's face and took her out to some very awkward tea, and how she did not heal her own, just ran her fingers over the pattern of the letters. You cannot always choose your scars, but sometimes you refuse to let them go.
Let's talk about how this was supposed to be one of Cho's sins, that she dared to stand beside a frightened, fallible girl and refuse to rend her for her mistakes.
Integrity. Honor. These were the tenets of her house.
Let's talk about Cho after the war. Let's talk about how none of them ever really left it behind.
Cho watched the next year's children come through the bookshop door, wander the shelves with their hands clasped tight in their parents'. This year's class wasn't as small as last years, the year of Dumbledore's Army, the year of Hogwarts's War, but the wizarding world was still a terrified place, if a less terrifying one.
They dropped stacks of books on her counter and she slipped them Weasley trinkets with their textbooks. She saw the door swing shut behind them, these young, jostling kids weighed down with a year's worth of knowledge. She thought this is what we fought for.
Cho would go out to dinner with the Patil twins, talk of jobs and boyfriends and girlfriends, of how these two knew best of all about the painfully precise line between courage and honor, between bravery and truth. But when the restaurant door slammed, they all jumped, their wands all suddenly ready in their tight fingers.
Hermione started hiding for hours in the back of Flourish and Blotts with her paperwork. She had gotten relevant enough up at the Ministry that she could hardly breathe without ten petitioners and angry opponents slamming on her door with its lovely little plaque.
"I just want to work," Hermione told Cho when she brought back two mugs of cocoa and her own accounting work after the store closed late in the evening.
"You sort of signed up for this," Cho pointed out.
The cocoa was good, rich, sweet, and reminded them of the time the Creevey brothers had shared their mother's care package with the whole DA, making sweet hot cocoa over a little stove the Room of Requirement cheerfully supplied. They had been so small, then, children.
Cho looked at Hermione, bushy hair bundled back and her lower lip between her teeth as she worked through a new law that would send half of wizardkind screaming to her front door.
Hermione had always been this brave. It had pushed her to scars and ruthlessness as much as to saving the world. All those kids, clustered around a little cooktop, inhaling chocolate, they didn't know what they were doing, but neither do we. We all just do our best.
Sometimes Cho gave the shop keys to her assistants and disappeared. Her parents had a little beach house up near Shell Cottage, where the grey skies made melancholy beautiful instead of sad. Luna sent her post cards from around the world and sometimes Cho would fly out and visit her on some blistering peak to find invisible monsters.
Sometimes she just hopped in a car--a real one, the kind her Muggle grandfather would drive her around in on old, hot Saturdays. It was a bit like flying, that roar under her feet, the whole world opening up before her. She would drive out, away from places where friends called her an honorary Gryffindor and stared, shocked, when she clung to her own ideals instead of their values.
Cho would go to Muggle pictures, to museums and long walks. She'd go to cafés, lean back, and listen to ordinary people talk about TV and politics and babies. Some days she wanted to inhale the world.
Sorrow is not isolated to stories of heroes. Wonder, light and life are not out of the reach of those who cannot cast Patronuses.
The children kept coming, year after year, dropped Bathilda Bagshot and basic potions in front of her, and then in front of her young new coworkers, and eventually her employees.
After that first year, the same Defense Against the Dark Arts book slammed, slid, and sat on the counter, the same boring cover, basic info, and bad prose--Cho saw the stock come in every year and her heart lifted. All curses fade in the end.
Dear Cho, I wish you no more brave boys.
I wish you friends who are kind before they are righteous, who are loving before they are certain. I wish you a lover with a questioning mind and a steady heart, one who has time for tears as well as laughter— because life is both.
But you know that.
For the rest of your life, for every vivid and unremarkable day, I hope you will cry with joy as much as you weep with grief. I hope that even if you do not, even if your sorrows outweigh your loves all the days of your life, you will still consider not one of those tears a waste.
Tears are for the living. You are alive.