<PERSON> answers this question during an interview, explaining it as follows:
Q: In the fifth book, <PERSON> can see the <PERSON>. Can you?
A: Yes, I can, definitely. That is a really good question, because it enables me to clear up a point. The letters that I’ve had about the Thestrals! Everyone has said to me that <PERSON> saw people die before could see the Thestrals. Just to clear this up once and for all, this was not a mistake. I would be the first to say that I have made mistakes in the books, but this was not a mistake. I really thought this one through. <PERSON> did not see his parents die. He was one year old and in a cot at the time. Although you never see that scene, I wrote it and then cut it. He didn’t see it; he was too young to appreciate it. When you find out about the <PERSON>, you find that you can see them only when you really understand death in a broader sense, when you really know what it means. 773
Someone said that <PERSON> saw <PERSON> die, but that is not true. He was unconscious when <PERSON> died, in Philosopher’s Stone. He did not know until he came around that <PERSON> had died when <PERSON> left his body. Then you have <PERSON>. With <PERSON>, fair point. <PERSON> had just seen <PERSON> die when he got back into the carriages to go back to Hogsmeade station. I thought about that at the end of Goblet, because I have known from the word go what was drawing the carriages. From Chamber of Secrets, in which there are carriages drawn by invisible things, I have known what was there. I decided that it would be an odd thing to do right at the end of a book. Anyone who has suffered a bereavement knows that there is the immediate shock but that it takes a little while to appreciate fully that you will never see that person again. Until that had happened, I did not think that <PERSON> could see the <PERSON>. That means that when he goes back, he saw these spooky things. It set the tone for Phoenix, which is a much darker book. 573