hayden panettiere

the light she kept reaching for.

i can’t stop crying. i don’t even know why this has entered me this deeply, but it has. my heart feels ripped open for a woman i never knew, and maybe that is the terrifying part — that i recognize something in her story. not the details. the weight. the way a woman can keep trying to crawl toward the light while life keeps asking her to survive another impossible thing. motherhood can break you open with a love so enormous that sometimes loving your child means making a decision that destroys you. grief can take someone you love and leave you standing in the same world, furious that the sun still rises, furious that people still order coffee, furious that your body is expected to keep breathing when something inside you has already been buried. i am angry. i am so fucking angry at how much pain a human being can be asked to carry. angry at the way we watch women unravel publicly and call it entertainment, weakness, bad choices, failure. angry at how quickly the world asks someone to get better, be better, come back prettier, come back healed, come back grateful. what if she was trying. what if she was trying so hard. what if some mornings simply getting out of bed was the bravest thing she did.

i keep thinking about her reaching for the light. speaking. laughing. showing up. imagining that maybe there was still another life waiting for her. and that is the part that scares me because i want to believe the light always wins. i need to believe it does. i need to believe that when we lose someone, the light they fought so hard to find does not disappear with them. maybe it moves. maybe it enters the people who loved them. maybe it becomes the tenderness we offer the next person before we know their whole story. maybe it becomes the moment we choose compassion instead of judgment. maybe it becomes the phone call we actually make. the hand we actually hold. the person we decide to sit beside instead of trying to fix. i don’t know. i don’t have anything wise enough for this today. i am a mother and a woman and i am scared by how fragile we are, and completely fucking awed by how hard we keep trying anyway. i just hope wherever hayden is, she knows she was never only the worst thing that happened to her. she was never only the things she lost. she was never only the darkness she walked through. she was someone’s daughter. someone’s mother. someone’s sister. someone who was here. someone who mattered. and maybe that is all i can hold tonight: that a life is so much bigger than the chapter where it hurts the most. rest in peace, hayden. i hope the light finally feels warm.