Hayden Panettiere was only thirty-six.

It is difficult to comprehend.

We Watched Hayden Panettiere Grow Up

Hayden’s career began before she was old enough to understand what a career was.

She moved from commercials and soap operas into film and eventually became internationally recognizable through Heroes, the 2006 phenomenon in which she played Claire Bennet, the seemingly indestructible cheerleader at the center of one of television’s most memorable storylines.

Later came Nashville.

As Juliette Barnes, Hayden gave us a woman who could be ambitious and vulnerable, difficult and deeply wounded, dazzling and desperately human. She performed her own songs, placed multiple recordings on Billboard’s country charts and received two Golden Globe nominations for the role.

Perhaps there is something haunting now about remembering the characters she played.

So many of them survived.

So many of them fought.

So many of them appeared impossibly strong while carrying pain underneath.

But Hayden Was More Than an Actress

There is another Hayden I want us to remember.

The woman who cared.

Long before activism became something celebrities were expected to display on social media, Hayden was using her visibility to draw attention to causes she genuinely believed in.

In 2007, as a spokesperson for the Whaleman Foundation, she traveled to Taiji, Japan, with fellow activists protesting the killing of dolphins.

She didn’t simply lend her name to a campaign.

She got into the water.

Hayden and several other protesters paddled out toward captured dolphins and formed a memorial circle in the water. According to the Whaleman Foundation, they were confronted by fishermen wielding poles and threatening them with boat propellers. Footage of the confrontation later became part of the wider international attention surrounding the Taiji dolphin hunt.

That tells me something about a person.

It is one thing to care when caring is comfortable.

It is another to act when doing so requires courage.

Hayden understood that fame had given her a voice, and she chose, at times, to use that voice for beings who had none.

That part of her legacy deserves to be remembered too.

The Cruelty of Living a Public Life

And then there is the part of Hayden’s story that makes me think about the way we treat people who become famous.

Society has a strange relationship with celebrity.

We build people up.

We photograph them.

We admire them.

We turn them into symbols.

And then, when their lives become complicated — when they make mistakes, struggle, fall apart or reveal themselves to be as vulnerable as every other human being — we can become merciless.

One day you are celebrated.

The next, you are crucified.

Hayden knew that world almost from childhood.

Her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, published only months before her death, described a life lived under relentless public observation and addressed postpartum depression, addiction and recovery, trauma, domestic abuse and loss. Her publisher described the book as an attempt to reclaim a story that so often had been told by other people.

There is something profoundly important in that.

Because when we know someone primarily through headlines, it becomes dangerously easy to confuse knowing about a person with knowing a person.

They are not the same thing.

Behind every photograph taken at the wrong moment, every difficult chapter, every public mistake and every judgment written by strangers was a woman trying to navigate her own life.

A daughter.

A sister.

A mother.

A friend.

A human being.

Perhaps We Could Judge Less

Hayden spoke publicly about struggles many people endure privately.

That vulnerability should never become permission for the rest of us to reduce someone’s entire existence to their most painful moments.

Human beings are complicated.

We can be strong and fragile.

Successful and lost.

Generous and imperfect.

We can fall and rise and fall again.

None of those things erase the love we gave, the work we created, the people we helped or the moments when we chose courage.

Perhaps we would all be better served by remembering that before we rush to condemn someone whose life we have never actually lived.

Hayden went through a great deal.

And yet there was still creativity.

There was still work.

There was still advocacy.

There was still hope.

Earlier this year, she put her own story into words with extraordinary candor, describing the difficult experiences that had fractured her life and the work of rebuilding herself.

She was still telling her story.

Still trying.

Still becoming.

And that is one of the things that makes losing her at 36 feel unbearably young.

The Light That Remains

I keep coming back to the little girl we watched become a woman.

The cheerleader.

The country star.

The actress.

The activist standing up for dolphins thousands of miles from Hollywood.

The woman who struggled.

The woman who survived things strangers knew about and undoubtedly many things they never did.

The woman who continued searching for her way forward.

That is the Hayden Panettiere I want to remember.

Not a headline about how she died.

A life.

A talented, beautiful, complicated, courageous human being who spent almost her entire existence in the public eye and still found moments in which to use that visibility for something larger than herself.

The circumstances of her death will eventually be determined by those responsible for determining them. There is no reason for the rest of us to speculate.

Today, I would rather remember the 36 years that came before.

The performances.

The laughter.

The vulnerability.

The courage.

The causes she stood for.

And that unmistakable light we watched grow up before our eyes.

Rest in peace, Hayden.

You were so very young.

And you will be remembered.

— Viviana Puello
Editor-in-Chief, ArtTour International