The reporters saw our “survivor” T-shirts and asked if we’d mind saying a few words. We were happy to do so. That’s why we were there.

But the words we truly want to say about the obscenity of gun violence, and the cowardice and cynicism of politicians, and the misplaced pity of the American public, their self-absorbed refusal to put their clickers down, get off their couches and — it all turns into a rant so quickly. Or tears. We need discipline to stay on message.

Reporters asked me that day — they keep asking me — about how it feels. How does it feel, after all I’ve been through, to be standing there the day after all those people were killed in Florida? The blinding camera light goes on, and I’m back in the interrogation chair. How it feels is that I’d like to plant a Boston cream pie in your face for asking such an inane question. How does it feel? Why would anyone need to know that? It feels awful, of course. Not because I “know what they’re going through.” How could anyone truly know what other people are going through when they hear their teenager is dead?

It feels terrible, is one answer. Because I understand from my own experience that when you suffer a loss like this, it feels like this: Not only has my loved one died, I have died as well. My former life, the life I would have lived with that now-dead loved one, exists no more. All the years we’ll spend grieving for our loved ones, we’ll also be grieving for our own lives — our old lives. Because we don’t know we’re grieving for ourselves as well as our loved ones, we can’t get to the source of our grief, and it comes to seem bottomless, as if the world were made of grief. But somehow we survive. It’s amazing how many of us survive. It’s amazing that survival is the rule rather than the exception.

I told the reporter: “It feels like it did the last time, and the hundreds of times before that. My son was killed 25 years ago. It doesn’t seem possible that this could keep happening.”