I won't carry the guilt. Not anymore. Not again.

“I won't carry the guilt. Not anymore. Not again.” is the decisive expression of Ewert Grens’s effort to stop bearing responsibility for deaths he believes were not his to answer for. Its force comes from the sequence around it: an earlier insistence that he did not kill a man, a visit to a woman’s grave, and, finally, a calm declaration before others that he will no longer accept the blame. The words are not simply a release from remorse; they mark a shift from private self-reassurance to public accusation.

The phrase in its immediate context

Three days before Grens speaks at the table, he has made a decision he dreaded throughout his working life: firing a lethal shot at another person. The text places that act directly beside his later words, so the refusal of guilt cannot be separated from the possibility that his shot caused a death. Grens says that he was not responsible for the man’s death. The expression thus distinguishes the act he chose from the death he fears may have followed; it does not erase the fact that he chose to shoot.

The other death enters through a different setting. The night before the table scene, Grens spends several hours at a modest grave that he had feared more than anything else he could remember. He says that he was not responsible for the woman’s death either. The narrative places the two claims beside each other, but preserves their distinct circumstances: one follows an armed decision made only days earlier, while the other emerges from a long-delayed visit to a grave. Grens’s declaration gathers both burdens without suggesting that the deaths happened in the same way.

From private insistence to public speech

An earlier passage gives the phrase a quieter precursor. Grens recognizes the woman who lies buried, distinguishing her from the woman in a nursing home who does not recognize him. He has already cried; instead, he smiles and insists that he did not kill the man. He then addresses the dead woman with the same denial. These brief statements are directed inward or toward the dead, not yet presented as a case argued before other people. The later declaration makes the change in audience matter: Grens speaks in a room where four people are present, and no one is in a rush to leave.

The wording intensifies through repetition and revision. “I won't carry the guilt” makes a decision about what Grens will bear; “Not anymore” presents that decision as a break with an established condition; “Not again” gives it the force of a refusal to repeat an earlier pattern. The lines that follow make the distinction more explicit: Grens says he was not responsible for either death, then states that he was not the person who committed murder. The phrasing moves from emotional burden to responsibility and then to the naming of a crime. The expression is therefore not an isolated reassurance but the opening claim in a confrontation over blame.

The confrontation over responsibility

Grens points at the people before him one at a time and tells each that the responsibility belongs to them. This gesture changes the direction of the scene. Until then, the deaths have been bound up with his own fear: the shot he fired, the grave he dreaded visiting, and the possibility that guilt is his to carry. By directing the accusation outward, he challenges the assumption that the person who bears the emotional burden must also be the person responsible for the deaths.

The scene does not establish, within these lines, the individual roles of everyone he addresses or settle the accusation as a legal finding. It does establish that Grens no longer speaks only in the language of denial. He makes a claim before witnesses, names murder, and assigns responsibility to those he points to. The calmness of his voice, noted immediately after the declarations, contrasts with the severity of what he says. His composure gives the statement the character of a considered reckoning rather than an outburst.

Meaning and narrative role

The expression holds together two different acts of reckoning: Grens’s attempt to accept that he fired the shot, and his refusal to accept that this makes him responsible for the man’s death; and his return to a grave he had long feared, followed by his insistence that the woman’s death was not his responsibility. It does not imply that grief has vanished. Instead, the sequence shows Grens confronting it directly, first through the grave visit and then through spoken claims about responsibility.

Its final force comes from the movement between the repeated first-person denials and the accusation addressed to others. Earlier, Grens says that he did not kill; at the table, he declares that he will not carry guilt and identifies other people as responsible. That movement gives the expression its narrative significance: it is a boundary drawn against self-blame, but also the start of an outward-facing demand that responsibility be acknowledged. The scene leaves the accusation in the room with those who hear it, while making clear that Grens will no longer treat guilt as proof of culpability.