J. K. Rowling’s critically acclaimed and wildly successful Harry Potter series details an orphan hero’s quest to reclaim a lost family, and, yet, very little of the previous scholarship has explored the perennial, overarching grief that spans the length of the series. Death litters the landscape of the text—there are 57 young deaths alone throughout the series—and the story is continually propelled forward as Harry reacts to each new episode of loss. Yet, too little attention has been paid to the depth to which grief colours Harry’s story, and the then necessary and consolatory function of what Freud calls “grief work” (Trauerarbeit). Written in response to her own mother’s death, Rowling attests that, “the books wouldn’t be what they are if she hadn’t died ... her death is on virtually every other page of the Harry Potter books,” and that, “[a]t least half of Harry’s journey is a journey to deal with death in its many forms, what it does to the living, what it means to die ... what survives death. It’s there in every single volume” (“Oprah”). The series is punctuated by numerous episodes that see Harry trying to “assuage his torturing grief” (DH 532), when, almost continuously, he is threatened by “a grief that ... actually weighed on his heart and lungs” (268). And while death falls under the category of natural law, so that one can never wholly reclaim the dead, within this realm, death is not marked by the same sense of permanence, and so familiar mourning practices then change when one can still have fellowship with, and be supported by those that are gone. Interestingly, however, these exceptions simultaneously complicate and ease mourning practices when the dead continue to surround Harry. How then is Harry able to navigate his own mourning, and, ultimately, willingly face his own death? In observing the story through a Freudian lens, this work will offer a hitherto unexplored reading of these iconic texts, as it will provide insight into the nature of mourning and melancholia within the Harry Potter series, and how it is that Harry is able to succeed at this seemingly Sisyphean task. I will examine the varying responses to death and the progression of grief in Lord Voldemort, Severus Snape and Harry Potter. Focusing primarily on these three prominent characters, I will apply Sigmund Freud’s model for organizing and examining the varying stages and categories of grief work to provide a unique perspective by which to study and map the progression of grief, from a state of pathological melancholia, wherein the sufferer remains diseased from one’s “failed grief,” to one of healthy and largely resolved mourning. Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” provides unique insight when reading Harry Potter, as the primary tenet of Freud’s mourning philosophy centers on his assertion that mourning is not solely an emotion, a passive experience that sees one patiently waiting for grief to end, but, rather, mourning becomes a performance that requires the grieving subject to actively engage with, and to work through, the reality of what has been lost. This distinction in meaning hinges on the German concept of Trauerarbeit, which contrary to the English term, offers a deeper, and a more labor-centered picture of what it means to mourn. Harry, to a degree unlike any other character in the text, thus sets to work on his mourning, not with the explicit and deliberate purpose for its completion, but more so as the instinctual and necessary means of coping. Thus, Freud’s theory is a useful tool when exploring how it is that Harry is able to successfully navigate his own mourning—within a world that largely inhibits mourning practices—and it ultimately explains how he is able to survive, and earn his title of, “the boy who lived!” (PS 18).