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Rarely have I met anyone as genuinely, honestly good as James Parker.

James, a former award-winning photographer for the News & Record and a long-, long-time friend, lost his daughter Arielle, 18, a college freshman, last weekend to an awful traffic accident.

James is such a good guy that I have never, in my life heard anyone say a bad word about him. And I have known him since he was a freshman and I was a junior at Carolina.

I was in his wedding. He was in mine.

I did not know Arielle. I wish I had. After attending her memorial service in High Point today, I truly regret barely meeting her. She was an extraordinary young person with an uncommonly strong and giving spirit and an unwavering faith. I learned that much through the words and tears of her friends and family, the long list of her accomplishments and her own marvelous singing and speaking voice through the magic of a pair of touching videos played at the service.

A rising freshman at Wingate University and a Grimsley High School graduate, she lost her life when a truck hit the car she was riding in last week, killing the driver as well and injuring others.

It is always hard to see a parent outlive his or her child. It is doubly hard to see it happen to such graceful and giving people as James and his wife Dijuana.

James and I left Carolina to spend most of our professional lives in the same workplaces, at the Winston-Salem Chronicle, where he rumbled into town in a jacked-up old muscle car with the tag “JP’s Z.”

And where we had more fun than ought be legal in the journalism business.

And the News & Record, where James won a variety of awards, including AP Photographer of the Year.

Now James works at N.C. A&T in the School of Agriculture and Environmental Science ... for one of our “old” colleagues at both the Chronicle and the News & Record, Robin Adams Cheeley.

I’ve always felt one of the keys to his effectiveness as a photographer was his ability to connect with people — to put them at ease with a kind word and a smile. He uses those same gifts in a variety of other, even more important ways as a youth pastor with Dijuana in the Church of God of Prophecy in High Point, and as an obviously loving and nurturing father.

That’s why it’s so easy to like James Parker.

Why it’s so hard to see him hurting.

And why so many of us want so badly to bear the pain for him and his family.