Taking a deep breath, George began. "Someone backing out of the driveway and running over their child is a tragedy. The Holocaust is a tragedy. People abusing their children is a tragedy. None of those things have to happen. But it's in the nature of things for people to get sick ad die, sometimes of cancer. And the outliers get it young. It's just statistics. Contrary to what you might believe, even I am nowhere near optimistic enough to believe that we can ever have a world in which there's no disease. That's the realm of science fiction.
"George, listen to me for once. James is dying. Don't you care?"
"I hear that he's dying, and of course I care. What kind of person do you think I am that I wouldn't care? I feel terrible that James is dying. I feel terrible for Marla and the girls. And you, I feel terrible for you too, because I know how much he means to you. And I feel terrible for me, because he's become a good friend. All our lives are going to change because of his death. But that's not a tragedy. Don't you see that?"
Nancy Pearl,
George & Lizzie (New York: Touchstone, 2017), p. 270
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