Some celebrity deaths feel strangely personal, especially when the person has been on your screen for most of your life.
I was lying in bed late at night, doing what most of us probably shouldn't be doing before going to sleep: doom scrolling.
Then I saw it.
Hayden Panettiere had passed away.
I stopped scrolling.
Like I always do when I see news like this online, especially news that doesn't seem real, I immediately went searching for confirmation. Maybe it was one of those fake celebrity death posts. Maybe someone had gotten something wrong. Maybe I had misread it.
But it was true.
And I just felt...sad.
Not because I knew Hayden Panettiere. Obviously, I didn't.
But because she wasn't much older than me.
There's something unsettling about seeing someone you grew up watching pass away so young. Someone who always seemed to exist somewhere in the background of your childhood and teenage years suddenly becomes a reminder of just how quickly time moves.
She Was Just Always There
For those of us who grew up in the 2000s, Hayden wasn't someone who suddenly appeared.
She was just there.
Remember the Titans
Raising Helen
Ice Princess
Bring It On: All or Nothing
Heroes
And, of course, I Love You, Beth Cooper (my personal favorite)
There's something so perfectly late-2000s about that movie. It's ridiculous, funny, chaotic and nostalgic in a way that's difficult to explain unless you lived through that particular era of teen movies.
Hayden was perfect as Beth.
Cool, beautiful, confident and a little chaotic, but also much more human than the fantasy everyone around her had created.
I could put that movie on today and immediately feel like I've been transported back to 2009.
Growing Up Alongside Someone You've Never Met
That's the strange thing about actors.
You don't know them.
But sometimes you grow up with them anyway.
You watch them when you're a kid. Then you're a teenager. Then suddenly you're an adult revisiting the same movies and wondering how that much time possibly passed.
Hayden went from the little girl in Remember the Titans to Claire Bennet in Heroes, then Juliette Barnes in Nashville and Kirby Reed in Scream.
And somewhere during all of that, we grew up too.
Maybe that's why seeing the news while lying in bed hit me harder than I expected.
It wasn't only sadness for someone whose work I'd enjoyed.
It was that uncomfortable reminder that none of us are as far away from being the kids watching these movies as we sometimes think we are.
One minute you're watching I Love You, Beth Cooper.
Then you blink.
It's nearly two decades later.
So tonight, I think I'll put it on again.
Not because I knew Hayden Panettiere.
But because, in that strange way pop culture works, she was part of growing up.
And sometimes that's reason enough to miss someone.
