Early and unexpected death is always tragic. It’s usually the job of newspapers to report the facts, leaving the emotional heavy lifting to counselors and clergy.

Sometimes, people share responsibility for their fate, like the drunken driver or the reckless motorcyclist. Sometimes they have taunted death by smoking cigarettes or ignoring health warnings.

But we have all been grieved this summer by a succession of random, senseless and seemingly unpredictable deaths:

• the four promising young people who die in a fiery airplane crash on a bright, cloudless day;

• the accomplished young woman killed by a falling tree along the banks of the placid Saco River;

• the Lisbon man whose truck is swallowed by a raging stream in New York state when a highway bridge disappears beneath it;

• the woman on the way to pick up relatives at Logan Airport killed when a concrete ceiling slab gives way and crushes her car; and

• the 17-year-old boy who died in Sabbathday Lake amid what moments before had been the fun and laughter of a day at the beach.

There is, of course, a practical cause for everything. In time, we may know why the airplane crashed. The tree, perhaps, had been weakened from within, the bridge was inadequate, the bolt gave way and the boy had a heart condition.

Mechanically, those things all make sense. But, philosophically, they are of no comfort.

They remind us that we can control a lot, but we can’t control everything. No matter how good our insurance plan, no matter how big our savings account, no matter how good our planning and attention to detail, bad things can happen. Death is often unfair.

Such random deaths remind us of our own vulnerability and eventual mortality. Perhaps they should also prompt us to reflect on our own lives and priorities.

Do we really have time for the petty jealousy? For our impatience, for the outrage we feel when someone cuts us off in traffic? For the harsh words to a friend or spouse, or the lingering bitterness toward a parent, or a parent toward a child?

Tragedies can help put our own lives in perspective, to remind us that life is precious, beautiful and, all too often, fleeting.

As the actor James Dean said: “Dream as if you’ll live forever; live as if you’ll die today.”

Dean died in 1955 when another car crossed into the path of his Porsche 550 Spyder near Choloma, Calif. He was 24.