"Bill believes in fate.." yeah...right... *grin

Since I have a piece of paper that sorta semi-officially allows me to pontificate on these matters, I will...(not that I wouldn't anyway.)

Asking "Do you believe in fate?" doesn't even phrase the question well enough. Kendall sorta asked why HE was ok and others weren't. That's not exactly the same as asking if those on the crashed plane were 'destined' to be there.
   There are 'chains of causality' which put you in one place rather than another at some particular time...(if you hadn't stopped to get a drink of water before leaving home, you wouldn't have been in that intersection when the truck ran the red light)... but the confusion arises when we start asking (or asserting) that some 'force'/'higher power'/'destiny' wanted you there....or not there.
   You can say accurately that billions of prior events, including your own decisions, put you 'there', but just using loaded words like destiny makes the entire incident feel different...and somehow, people like to add "I believe that XYZ..." to their stories, as if that settles the matter.

I, personally, have been fortunate to have a few close calls in traffic, but no serious accidents. If I change 'fortunate' to 'lucky', the feel of the incident seems to be different. If I, (as some do), use words like 'granted' to describe my escape from danger, there's a whole new realm being implicitly assumed. This is where you get one survivor of a plane crash that kills 127 saying "God must have been with me". And God was too busy to save the other 127? Or to show that mechanic the electrical short that caused the plane to crash? Or in the case of the flight right ahead of Kendall's, to have the plane de-iced again after sitting too long on the runway? (I watched the rescue attempts live as they were happening a few miles from my house).

Donuel & Little Hawk comment about 'leaving a note from beyond the grave'....well, *I* have seriously contemplated leaving instructions with some trusted, healthy, younger person on how to access my computer and my Mudcat account, and posting a note in the middle of my OBIT thread, from me, saying, "I told you there was nothing here after death!"