You have loved someone you could not keep. You did everything right — you were careful, you were faithful, you held on with both hands — and it did not matter. The loss came anyway. That is the grief nothing prepares you for. Not the grief of being careless. The grief of having loved well, and losing all the same.
The old North had a name for this. Baldr. Balder the Beautiful, the shining one. Hall reads him as the solar hero, the Christ-like figure at the heart of the Nordic story — the bright god everything loved. And his death is the hinge of the whole cosmos. When Baldr falls, the twilight of the gods begins. The light goes out of the world not because the world hated it, but because even a loved thing can be taken.
Hall says this is the oldest myth wearing a hundred faces. Osiris cut down by his brother. Tammuz buried in the seventh layer of the underworld. The sun brought low at the winter solstice. The Christ in the tomb. A god comes down into matter, is broken, is buried, and is raised. He treats these not as stories that happen to rhyme, but as one true pattern the old peoples set down again and again, because it was true of the world and true of themselves.
And here is the hard part. Hall says the light gods are all love gods. They protect. They preserve. They lift up and redeem every form of life. Love is exactly what the light is made of. So Baldr's death is not the failure of love. It is the proof that love, by itself, cannot ransom a life back from the dark. The whole world weeps for the shining one, and he stays dead.
But Hall does not leave you in the tomb. He starts from the plainest fact the ancients had: nobody lit the light. It was never kindled from nothing, in some age or generation. And a light that was never lit cannot go out. "From the tiniest atom to the greatest star, light is a symbol of the presence of life." If the light is eternal, then life is eternal too — and immortality stops being a hope you cling to and becomes a certainty you can read straight off the sky.
So the loss is not waste. Hall calls it exchange. The dying god, he says, dies in man — you become the tomb of a buried brightness, and the work of a whole life is to raise it by your own soul. The one you grieve is not extinguished. Buried, yes. Waiting, yes. But a buried light is still a light.
Watch the sun on the shortest day of the year. It sinks so low you think it has finally gone for good. And then, without your permission, without your effort, it turns and begins the long climb back. Baldr had to die so you would learn to trust that turn. Love could not keep the light overhead. But it was never love's job to keep it. It was love's job to carry it — down into the dark, and back.