Other than the Herbology professor, yes, I noticed that.
Actually, as soon as I saw "nineteen years later", I said, "Uh-oh". When something covers time so slowly (one book = one year) and then makes a bigggg jump, I get a little nervous. (Visions of Battlestar Galactica came to mind, actually.)
I actually put the book down, finished some chores and came back to it. Needed time to prepare.
I probably would've liked an epilogue that took place either 3-6 months later or maybe 5 years later. 19? Way too far off.
And, hey, how come the last word of the book wasn't "Scar"? Changed her mind, eh?
I thought I'd remember her saying it was going to be, and yes I was wondering about that. Especially since the ending doesn't seem like it was adapted for anything that happened after book 1.
Ms. Rowling knew she'd need to create a baby named "Teddy" sometime, and she'd need a plausible relation between a Weasley and someone French; but further details would be unimportant. When Nymphadora's dad entered later on, he was named so his grandson could meet the requirement. And of course Fleur could barry Bill.
Really, what information is there in the epilogue that isn't in Book 1?
While there were a few details in later books which were made to fit the ending, the ending ignores the later books. When Ms. Rowling wrote the ending, she probably had no idea that there would be a Luna Lovegood, nor a Nymphadora Tonks, nor Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, Delores Unbridge, et al. Consequently, all those characters are effetively ignored.
My first thought seeing the 19 years thing was “what she didn’t want to portray the 20th Hogwarts re-union?” Of course I thought that in large part because I’m working with people and planning our own 20th high school re-union right now so it’s kind of on the brain. But that also gets me thinking the reason to go that far is that you really find out what happened to the people and how they turned out. 3 to 6 months after I got out of high school you really wouldn’t have been able to tell how any of us were going to turn out. 5 years out maybe the over the achievers were on detectable paths, at the very least in grad school or with their first post college “real” job, but that would only cover about 10%. Even at the 10 year re-union it was a little sketchy, probably half the class was on path and the rest were dead-eyeing 30 and panicing. But now getting set for 20 it’s all pretty well cemented, we’ve got our careers, we’ve got as much family as we want to have, we know how we’ve turned out.
I don’t know if any of that ran through her head, I just know that after my experience of the last few months if I wrote a series of books about high school aged kids then wanted an epilogue to tell the audience how they turned out 19 or 20 years into the future sounds about right.
Ah, but the Potter novels already *have* flying motorcycles.