Sixth movie is a "grieving" success.

• Position: Two More Sides of Harry Potter

Grief and death play a substantial part in the film, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince;' released earlier this summer and a likely popular DVD gift this upcoming holiday season. The movie presents an opportunity for people to become more comfortable with these topics, asserts Heather Servaty-Seib, a counseling psychologist at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind.

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"Author J.K. Rowling isn't afraid to talk about death and dying, and she has done a good job handling grief in the Harry Potter series. Her characters and storylines show that grieving is idiosyncratic, and that's good because it is unique to each person."

In the book on which the latest movie is based, the teenage heroes frequently discuss people who have died and, at the end, a significant character dose to Harry Potter dies. Death has been a meaningful part of the series from the beginning, when we learn that Potter's parents were killed when he was an infant. It then continued with the deaths of other key characters, such as a fellow student and Potter's godfather.

"Unfortunately, there is often a presumption in our culture that there is a particular way to grieve, but grief is very...