Philip Seymour Hoffman Reminds Us That 'Death Has Its Own Schedule'

The death of Philip Seymour Hoffman has caused an outpouring of grief from those mourning an Academy Award-winning actor who is "gone too soon."

But is anyone ever gone at the right time? Rabbi Daniel Greyber told HuffPost Live that Hoffman's passing is a reminder that "death has its own schedule."

"We have a sense that people should live a full life in the sense of number of years," he said. "One of the things that happens when someone doesn't live into old age is we have a sense that there's an expectation that's been cut short."

That expectation of a lengthy life often becomes an excuse for avoiding important issues, Greyber said.

"We try to keep ourselves safe from a very scary reality, which is that we don't know how long it is that we're going to live, we don't know when the end of our lives is going to come, and because we try to steer away from that, we actually avoid saying things that we should say to people who we love and living the lives that we should," he said.

Watch the full HuffPost Live conversation on coping with an untimely death below.