In some traditions there was a figure who volunteered to hold the surplus, the portion of suffering that no one should carry alone, which accumulates in families and disasters and in the quiet long evenings of people who have no language for what they are bearing. This figure had no name in most accounts. Sometimes a woman, sometimes a man, sometimes described as neither.
The keeper held everything that was given. The giving was voluntary but also inevitable; you could not hold a thing that wanted to be given to someone equipped to carry it. The keeper's body was the same as anyone's, which was the theological problem various traditions had tried to solve in various ways, none satisfactorily.
The redistribution described in those traditions was different from what we understand now. It was not across all living people; it was from the keeper back into the world. When the keeper's portion grew large enough, it returned, not to those who had given it, but to those who were ready. What ready meant was the part the accounts disagreed on. Some said willing. Some said strong. Some said done with the thing that had generated the burden in the first place.
The last redistribution, in those accounts, happened when the keeper was very old and had held things for so long that the burden had become almost neutral, not light, exactly, but worn smooth, like a stone that has been in the river a long time.
What the traditions did not anticipate was this: what the recipients discovered, upon receiving their portion, was not difficulty. It was information. The load told them something about the shape of what they had been carrying all along. Some wept. Some sat very still. Some found that the new weight was lighter than the old one, because it had a name now, and named things are easier to set down.
What happened to the keeper afterward is not in any account that survives.