I think it’s most important how people respond to the things that happen, not that there’s a reason why they happen — they just happen; and some things happen by happenstance, with no rhyme or reason.

At my good friend’s untimely death a year ago, at the memorial, the choir sang, “His Eye Is On the Sparrow.” In sharing a few words, I responded that Shakespeare wrote that “there’s a certain providence even in the fall of a sparrow.”

If everything predestined, then nothing we do really matters? It’s going to happen anyway. That was the moral to many Greek tragedies: that the will of the gods couldn’t be avoided, and that we can’t run from fate, from the inevitable, those things that just happen.