As I start this, I have no idea where it will go. Tragedy is like that, and so is grief, so maybe a lot of us are feeling that way after what’s happened in Boulder.

I’ve been here a lot, professionally and personally, so I can offer what I know.

All you can do is put one foot in front of the other and say the words that need to be said, even when the words are messy and hard to find. Too many people can relate, and the list just keeps growing. That brings me more pain than comfort. 

Officer Eric Talley will never go home and tell his kids about rescuing baby ducks, a tragedy rippling like a tsunami across nine other families in Boulder. The families of the eight killed last week in Atlanta joined our large but lonely fraternity.

I say this to both sides of the political fight: Nobody gives a toot about hunting rifles and home protection. We all care about stopping the ruined lives. I don’t know why that’s so hard for the politicians to figure out. The list of things that should keep politicians up at night is long, though. I don’t know why anybody would want the job, when so little changes in the things that matter most. Maybe it’s the money or power. 

My father bled to death on a barroom floor on March 6, 1966, carrying a pistol he didn’t have time to reach for. He wasn’t a good guy with a gun. He was a dead guy with a gun. The reason? Nobody could really say.

The ghost of inexplicable violence has chased our family my whole life, and the friends and family of the dead in Atlanta and Boulder will run, too. The barrel of a gun changed their life. You can blame the shooter first, but the barrel empowered him. They’ll see the barrel in their sleep.

Time will ease the pain. They can take solace in that. The questions never go away, until the question marks become the way they think. There’s nothing there that’s going to give them peace.

What do we know now of the Aurora theater shooter, nearly nine years on? He was a pathetic person, a time bomb nobody heard ticking. That’s all I care to know. I don’t care if he’s happy in prison, or if he’s come to the Lord. I tried deconstructing Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and all I found was a crazy kid and an enabling mom.

I was there in Newtown covering the shooting in the week after, just before a snowy Christmas. One of my stories I wrote for the Connecticut papers involved talking to Columbine survivors I’d met over the years to offer the families of Sandy Hook some guidance and comfort.

Let peace find you, the Coloradans all sort of said back then. There’s nothing you can do but to keep on living. The world sadly spins beyond this moment, for better or worse.

In one story that I said Sandy Hook was a community that felt frozen in Christmastime. A New England village fit for the cover of a Whitman’s Sampler, it would never know another Christmas unstained by a crazy kid.

Daniel Barden, the tousle-haired red-headed 7-year-old, would be preserved in memory from 2012. People will recall his Christmas picture that year, beaming a smile missing his two front teeth, I predicted. I get it. My dad is forever 26, and he has hair like Elvis.

First-graders and heroic faculty and five funerals with closed caskets in four days was a lot to absorb, and I didn’t handle it well. I went back there on my own dime the next year for the first anniversary. I hoped to get a monkey off my back where it climbed on.

I met up with my buddy Mark Zaretsky, a star reporter for the New Haven Register, at Sally’s Apizza my first night in town. We’d hoped to drink a lot of beer and go urinate on the killer’s grave. Prescient, the family handled his remains privately. I’d considered what word I might write in the snow to sum up my feelings.

My dad’s killer, Johnny Price, had a mob lawyer and served a pittance of sentence. He walked out of a bar full of rough men, but the cops caught up with him later that night. A few years later Price was found shot to death in a phone booth. The two men who towered over my young life were both dead, and I wasn’t even in high school. There was nothing left to blame.

Time and again, what survivors are left with is nothing: an emptiness that will never fill and the question marks of a lifetime never lived. You have to let it go.

I could care less about the Boulder killer’s reasons or what trouble he’s seen, because they are light years away from being good enough. That’s for his lawyers to worry about, and no one else. He can burn in the hottest corners of Hell, as far as I’m concerned, and if he runs into Johnny Price, he can tell him I’m coming.