I’ve been around long enough to develop a pretty good understanding life is fairly absurd and therefore shouldn’t be taken too seriously. I’ve generally been able to find the joy in things, to see a lot more of the brightness and not so much of the dark.

Not this week.

Our family Christmas tree is part decoration, part annual monument. Years ago, when our first was born, my wife began the habit of adding ornaments to commemorate or celebrate or just acknowledge our growing family.

Sometimes the events are big, sometimes not so much.

A car to mark someone’s 16th birthday and fi rst auto.

A skier to signify that fi rst spring break away from home. A cat, because, well, one of them is so much like a kitten, lounging endlessly on the sofa. A replica of the Space Shuttle telling our dreamer to reach for the stars.

It’s probably a good thing we have a large Christmas tree because, frankly, we have a lot of kids. Every year it’s my job to set that tree up, to carefully unwrap every ornament and find a place for it. And every year the stories come back. Some of those ornaments are a little worse for wear now, but I hangthem anyway. They’re not decoration. They’re memory, and when I’m done, I sit back and stare, and the years roll backward and they’re little and we’re young all over again.

Upstairs in our attic are keepsake boxes for all the kids. Report cards, pictures, smiling little faces in their team uniforms, trying to look just like the real Braves or Cardinals or Titans, except the real Braves or Cardinals or Titans probably don’t have quite as much ice cream on their jerseys. And those hand prints. The ones with the cheesy poem about remembering them when they were this small.

Lots of people have those traditions. The ornaments are certainly not a novel idea. Neither are the team pictures or the report cards or the hand prints. Lots of families have them.

I bet lots of families in Newtown, Conn., have them, too.

So what do you do? What do you do in the now-emptyroom? What do you do when that’s the last picture, the last report card, the last painted rock art project?

What do you do when you and the world will continue to age, but that face peeking out under the ball cap will forever stay the same?

What do you do when the hand that made that print won’t ever get any bigger?

And how do you handle the conversations that will come later and re-open the wound so quickly? How will you explain you had a son or a daughter, a brother or a sister, but you don’t now? How do you fi ll that awkward, embarrassed silence when a stranger asks an innocent question about your family?

When I started writing this column, I promised I wouldn’t get political, and I won’t. I don’t know the answer. I don’t own guns myself, but as a Southerner by birth and heritage, the idea of gun ownership is no more foreign to me than drinking sweet tea with dinner. I know there are people who, justifi ably, feel the need for protection. And I know that, even as I sit in our prosperous little corner of the state, there are people for whom hunting is not a hobby, but the diff erence between eating and going hungry.

I also know when adamaged person reaches out to do harm, it’s far easier for him when he’s armed.

Policy debates in the aftermath of tragedies are almost cruel in nature. Too much unearned emotion, too much grandstanding, too much, too much, too much.

It’s seldom they produce meaningful answers. And it’s never they fi ll the void.

They don’t tell you what to do now. They don’t tell you how to answer those questions. They don’t tell you what’s to become of you and the life you thought you had.

Parents the world over are bound together by chains of fear and threads of hope.

For us, days like last Friday and places like Sandy Hook Elementary School forge those chains even tighter, fray that thread a little more. We can’t dismiss those images. We can’t help but feel the anguish and the loss. We don’t know what to do.

I have my answer, the best I can come up with. I hug my sons and daughters, my wife and now my grandchild tighter. I pray for them and for all the children, and all the parents, all bound together.

And I sit in the dark, and stare at the Christmas tree.

GARY SMITH IS A RECOVERING JOURNALIST LIVING IN ROGERS.

Opinion, Pages 5 on 12/20/2012