Guilt and responsibility for death

Guilt and responsibility for death form a conflict between memory, grief, and culpability in Ewert Grens’s story. The idea takes shape around two deaths: the woman whose death has returned to him for twenty-nine years, and Piet Hoffmann, at whom Grens recently made the decision to fire a lethal shot. Grens’s struggle is not simply to stop feeling responsible. It is to decide what responsibility means, and whether grief has turned his memories into a verdict against himself.

The old wound and its recurrence

For most of his adult life, Grens has repeatedly relived the moment when the woman fell from a police van and he failed to stop in time. His recollection fixes on the vehicle’s back wheels passing over her head and the blood on his lap. The memory returns several times a day, making the past less a settled event than a scene he is forced to undergo again. Its repetition gives guilt a daily rhythm: even when hours pass without the memory, he feels compelled to return to it and dwell on it longer.

The account does not present this recurrence as a useful path to understanding. Grens reaches a point where he cannot continue doing it, yet effort alone cannot redirect his attention. At the cemetery he looks at trees, graves, and a memorial garden, but none enables him to concentrate on the woman’s eyes or the movements he remembers. The failed attempt matters: the memory is not mastered by avoidance, and it does not yield simply because he commands himself to look elsewhere.

His arrival at the grave gives the recurring memory a physical destination. The grave is modest: overturned earth, a temporary flowerbed with something green, and a small white wooden cross. Grens waters a bush that has no flowers. These plain details contrast with the large, engraved stones he has passed, where the dead are identified by titles or gathered into prominent family monuments. Here, the act of tending the grave is small and direct, but it brings him face to face with the person his memory has kept in motion.

The cemetery and the person remembered

At the grave, Grens distinguishes the woman who lies there from the woman he has imagined through later years of illness: the person in a wheelchair in a nursing home who no longer recognizes him. He recalls an earlier life instead—the girl who held his hand on walks through Stockholm at dawn, struggled alongside him on skis, and later moved in with a young man. The sequence restores a person across different stages of life, rather than allowing the final image of illness to stand for all that she was.

That change in focus does not erase the death or revise the past. Instead, it alters what Grens is addressing when he stands at the grave. He is not speaking only to the person he remembers as helpless or to the figure produced by his recurring account of the accident; he recognizes the earlier companion as the one who lies there. The distinction gives the cemetery scene its emotional force without making it a cure. Grens has already cried, and at the grave he smiles. His emerging relief is expressed not as the disappearance of grief but as a separation between loving and remembering the dead and claiming that he killed them.

Two deaths, different questions of responsibility

The novel places the old death beside Grens’s recent decision to fire a lethal shot at Piet Hoffmann. Three days after that decision, Grens describes it as one he had dreaded throughout his working life. The comparison makes clear why the new death threatens to awaken the old guilt: both bring him to the question of whether he is responsible for another person’s death. But the passages also keep the two circumstances distinct. The earlier loss has shaped his adult life through persistent, repeated recollection; the more recent death follows a deliberate decision to use lethal force.

In the cemetery scene, Grens reaches the blunt recognition that the thing he feared has already happened. The phrase turns his fear away from prediction: he is not waiting for some future death to become real. The deaths and the choices associated with them are already part of his life. That recognition does not settle whether every aspect of his actions was right. It does, however, interrupt the old pattern in which fear and memory continually return him to a personal accusation.

Refusing inherited guilt

The next day, Grens speaks calmly to four people gathered around a table. He states that he will no longer carry the guilt, and separates himself from responsibility for Hoffmann’s death and the woman’s death. He also rejects the description of himself as the person who committed murder, pointing to the people present and assigning the accusation to them. The account does not identify those people in this passage, so the force of the gesture lies in its transfer of responsibility, not in an explanation of each person’s role.

This ending does not suggest that Grens has forgotten either death. The cemetery visit has required him to face the grave and the life he associates with it; his admission that he made a decision to fire at Hoffmann acknowledges the gravity of his own action. What changes is his refusal to make private grief the same thing as criminal guilt. His repeated declarations convert an inward burden into an outward accusation: responsibility, the scene insists, must be assigned to the people whose actions warrant it rather than absorbed by the person who has suffered and remembered.

The contrast between the private grave and the public table gives the theme its structure. At the cemetery, Grens tends a small, unfinished-looking plot and recovers the dead woman as a whole person. In the later room, he addresses living listeners and identifies them as responsible. One scene confronts the persistence of mourning; the other contests who must bear blame. Together, they leave guilt neither dismissed as meaningless nor accepted as an unquestionable measure of love or conscience.