Like Tuesday's child, Nancy Miller was filled with grace. She worked at this newspaper for 30 years, and she worked a variety of jobs. Readers knew her best as the lifestyle editor because in that particular job, she wrote a weekly column about, well, life. That is to say, there was no theme to it.

She was one of a small group of staff members from Arkansas. Most had no accents. Then there was Nancy. "She goes to Berlitz every year for a retainer class," one of her Arkansas colleagues used to say.

Back in the days when this was an afternoon newspaper, one of the shifts on the copy desk was from 11:30 at night to 6 in the morning. The people working that shift used to grouse good-naturedly about the difficulty of having a social life. So John Duxbury, who worked the overnight shift for sports and lived downtown, opened his apartment for parties that began when people who kept normal hours were just getting up. Nancy was one of the organizers.

She retired last year the way so many people retire these days — not 100 percent voluntarily. Like papers around the country, this newspaper has been shedding staff members. We've done it humanely. Rather than layoffs, we've had buyouts.

When the music stopped, Nancy was gone. No clear rhyme or reason. Just the sort of thing she wrote about in her columns. It was life.

It cannot be easy to leave a place you have worked for 30 years and it cannot be easy to enter the job market in your late 50s, but Nancy was, as always, filled with grace. She worked hard until the day she left, and she did it with a smile. If she felt even the slightest bit of rancor or bitterness, she hid it completely.

What a graceful way to leave. Smart, too. She continued to write for the paper. A couple of travel stories, a couple of food stories.

She was murdered in her home in Chesterfield last week.

I am not good at keeping up with former colleagues, and I had not known that Nancy had gone to work as an adviser for the school newspaper at Forest Park Community College. But she had, and the initial story about her murder mentioned that she had been working with students at the community college.

Perhaps she had gotten involved with the wrong student, I thought.

That is probably what a lot of people were thinking. We might not be arrogant enough to believe we're masters of our own fate, but we like to think we have some control. Instead, we're more akin to the surface of the moon, pockmarked by craters from meteors that slam into us willy-nilly. No rhyme or reason.

I remember when former Post-Dispatch reporter Lisha Gayle was murdered in her home in a gated community in University City in 1998. Much was initially made of the fact that she worked with underprivileged kids. Perhaps that had something to do with it, I thought at the time.

But no. Lisha's murder was random, senseless. A burglary gone bad. She was in the shower when the burglar came in. Who knows? Often, the daylight burglars ring the bell and if nobody answers, they figure nobody's home. Maybe that's what happened. The running water obscured the chimes.

Nancy lived in Chesterfield. If any place is safe, Chesterfield should be. But that's the point. The meteors slam into us willy-nilly.

In this instance, initial reports identify the meteor as 27-year-old Brian Walters. He was just released from prison. He had moved in with his parents across the street from Nancy. Imagine their horror when Nancy's body was found? "It couldn't be Brian, could it?"

Not all of the details have been released. One of our reporters went to the neighborhood on Saturday to interview neighbors. He saw the police bringing Walters out from around the back of the house. Perhaps he was taking the police through the crime. The official word was that Walters was being cooperative.

So we'll soon know more, and that's all to the good, but what will we really learn other than the hard truth that sometimes there is no rhyme or reason to things, which is something Nancy used to write about with good humor and grace.