For those of you baffled by the Tonks/Remus storyline . . .

[pegkerr]

You need to read John Granger's Unlocking Harry Potter: Five Keys for the Serious Reader. It all comes down to alchemy. From John Granger's website The Hogwarts Professor (hogwartspro) here:Ms. Rowling said in a 1998 interview that she had read a “ridiculous amount” about alchemy before writing the books and that this is what sets the “magical parameters and logic” in Harry Potter (if you want to learn more about alchemy in these books, see chapters 3-5 in Unlocking Harry Potter: Five Keys for the Serious Reader ). The last stage of the seven cycle alchemical Great Work is called the Rubedo or “red stage” and features an alchemical wedding of the Red King and White Queen, the death of this couple and the creation of the “philosophical orphan,” the resolution of contraries, the revelation of the accomplishments of the “white stage” (here, Half-Blood Prince), and the appearance of the “Rebis” or “double-natured person” (Hermaphrodite). As the “Black” and “White” stages of the books featured the players and the death of the characters with these names, it was widely assumed that the Rubedo of Deathly Hallows would feature Rubeus Hagrid. We had the wedding, the death of a couple (just not Bill and Fleur!), an orphan, the resolution of the Gryffindor/Slytherin chasm within wizardry and the Wizards First prejudice, the revelations of what really happened in Prince, and Harry’s acting as Quintessence, Savior/sacrifice, and Rebis. But Hagrid? How important were his parts in the opening and the finale? Did his carrying Harry out of the forest close the story he began by breaking the door on the House on the Rock in Stone? Nice golden binding, though, for the last book and lead-to-gold finish…
Remus and Tonks died, and left the orphan Teddy because they were the mystical Alchemical Couple, present in the almost-last stage of refining gold from base metal, which is symbolic of the purifying of the soul [Harry's soul].