The carnage of death is painful to ponder even from afar. It is exponentially more devastating as it gets closer: your town, your school…your son’s casket.

Veronique Ponzer lost her 6-year-old son, Noah, at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012. At his funeral, she wanted attending Connecticut Governor Dannel P. Malloy to not only speak in honor of her little boy, she wanted him to stand next to his casket and view the carnage wrought by the Bushmaster M-4 military rifle wielded by a deranged man who brought his mother’s legally owned weapon to school to slaughter 26 people, 20 of them children.

One of them Noah. He was the youngest victim, shot 11 times.

“I needed it to have a face for him,” Pozner said. “If there is ever a piece of legislation that comes across his desk, I needed it to be real for him.”

So at the Abraham L. Green & Son Funeral Home in Fairfield on Dec. 17, just before the start of Noah’s service, Pozner took Malloy by the arm and led him to her son’s open casket.

The governor weeps.