She was 33 and leaves behind a 4-year-old son. Her presumed death is being considered accidental.

The disappearance has resonated powerfully — across headlines, on social media and elsewhere in the culture. People can't avert their eyes because they are horrified at the apparent death of a young, beautiful person.

Then there is the oddity that she is the third of the show's actors to have apparently passed at a very young age. Co-stars Cory Monteith died in 2013 of a drug overdose and Mark Salling died by an apparent suicide in 2018.

As we lament Rivera's loss, we can't help but evaluate our own lives and perhaps ask ourselves some questions.

Facing death — the idea of it, even — is never easy. There's something especially tragic, though, about early, untimely death; about being forced to consider the potential lost in a life not quite fully lived.

With celebrities, the feeling may be heightened, because they are, after all, larger than life and often present us an idealized image of a life we might aspire to.

Rivera began acting at the age of 4 on the show "The Royal Family." Over her nearly three-decade career, she appeared in the "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air," "Family Matters," "The Bernie Mac Show," "Baywatch," "CSI: Miami," and many others, including "Glee."

Still, at 33, one assumes she had many years of career ahead of her.

Her story is particularly jarring in a time when emotions around illness and death are top of mind for most of us.

Months of living through the Covid-19 pandemic has had many of us contemplating mortality: how short life is (and tenuous), how we want to spend the time we have — the length of which, it has perhaps never been clearer, is entirely unknown.

The death of anyone reminds us: What have we not done, what could we be doing? Should we re-prioritize our lives? And we've already seen a lot of that happen during lockdowns and dislocation from our families, friends and jobs.

For many, taking a step back from typically busy lives has afforded them the opportunity to question whether those lives are the ones they really want to live and, if not, what changes they may be inclined to make.

At the same time, the sudden death of another can help us reconsider how much we "need to know" what our own lives will bring and to stop making rigid plans.

Humans are wired to plot and fret so much about the future, but what Covid has shown us, and what young death shows us tenfold, is that we can't know what will happen tomorrow. Learning to live in the now becomes essential.

When dealing with death in the present or at any point in one's life, it's key to understand that emotions will vary, but are to be felt (and not avoided) to best process and deal with the pain.

Such emotions can include hurt, confusion, anger, regret. They are not necessarily comfortable emotions, but they must be experienced. How they are experienced on any given day will differ from the next. Taking one day at a time may be a cliché, but i

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