Maria Vinterberg

In May 2019, Maria Vinterberg was driving home from Paris with her youngest daughter when a car hit them from behind in Belgium. The driver of the other vehicle had been talking on his phone. Maria survived with a punctured lung, broken ribs, and burns. Her daughter did not. In the hospital, heavily medicated and barely able to speak, Maria had the poet Inger Christensen’s “Sommerfugledalen” running through her head. She did not know she knew it by heart. Later, an orthopedic surgeon who had worked with her oldest daughter leaned over her and said: “You think you’re going to get insane, but you’re not.” That sentence became an anchor.

The attempt to create order

In the months after the accident, Maria’s mind did what minds do when faced with the incomprehensible: it tried to make sense of it by assigning blame. She found herself scanning the sequence of events—if she had not gone to Paris, if she had listened to a vague unease she felt beforehand. “If there has to be real order in it, then it’s my fault,” she says. “If I can give myself the blame, then there’s a mess. If I let go of the guilt, then everything is chaos.” She knows rationally that it was an accident, that she is not responsible. But at night, “when the demons dance modern dance in the winter camp,” the logic returns. The guilt is not a verdict; it is a strategy for control. Without it, she would be left anx