What is time travel if not a security problem? - Emily St. John Mandel

She never dwelt on my lapses, and I couldn’t entirely parse why this made me feel so awful. There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.

Isn’t that reality? Won’t most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways, our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of the people around us?

I just want them to know that it happened for a reason."
"Look, Tyler, some things just happen." This close, the stillness of the ghost plane was overwhelming.
"But why did they die instead of us?" the boy asked, with an air of patiently reciting a well-rehearsed argument. His gaze was unblinking.
"Because they were exposed to a certain virus, and we weren't. You can look for reasons, and god knows a few people here have driven themselves half-crazy trying, but Tyler, that's all there is."
"What if we were saved for a different reason?"
"Saved?" Clark was remembering why he didn't talk to Tyler very often.
"Some people were saved. People like us."
"What do you mean, 'people like us'?"
"People who were good," Tyler said."People who weren't weak."
"Look, it's not a question of having been bad or...the people in there, in the Air Gradia jet, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.