Hayden Panettiere is dead.
That sentence is still strange to write.
For me, my connection to Hayden Panettiere wasn’t primarily through Heroes or Nashville, even though I know those are the projects she’s best known for.
My connection to her was largely through Kingdom Hearts.
Hayden voiced Kairi, one of the central characters in the Kingdom Hearts series, as well as Xion, one of the major characters introduced in Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days. She went on to reprise those roles in later Kingdom Hearts games.
And if you’ve spent any amount of time with Kingdom Hearts, you know how important those characters are.
Kairi is one of the central figures in the entire story. Xion’s story involves identity, friendship, memory, loss, and what it means to exist.
So hearing that Hayden had died at just 36 years old was already incredibly sad to me simply because I knew her work through something that has been meaningful to me.
But then came the reports about how she may have died.
According to recent reporting, investigators believe Hayden may have unknowingly taken an oxycodone pill that was contaminated with fentanyl. I want to emphasize the word may here. The investigation is ongoing, and the official toxicology determination has not been publicly finalized, so I am not going to pretend that we know every detail yet.
But if that is ultimately what happened, there is something about this story that immediately made me think of someone else.
My friend Connor Barr.
And I know what some people might be thinking.
Why are you talking about an actress, a video game, and your dead friend?
Honestly?
Because this is my blog.
And that’s kind of how my brain works.
Everything connects.
A news story reminds me of a character.
A character reminds me of a piece of media that has been part of my life.
That reminds me of a person.
That person reminds me of grief.
And suddenly I’m writing about all of it.
I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
In fact, I think that’s part of what makes a personal mental-health blog a personal mental-health blog.
Life doesn’t happen in neatly separated categories.
We don’t experience grief only when we’re sitting down specifically to grieve.
We don’t think about our friends only when we’re looking at photographs of them.
We don’t process death only through funerals and memorials.
Sometimes we’re watching a movie.
Sometimes we’re playing a video game.
Sometimes we’re scrolling through the news.
Sometimes we’re listening to a song.
And suddenly something hits a nerve.
That’s what happened here.
Because the circumstances being reported in Hayden’s death reminded me of Connor.
And I know I have talked about Connor before.
Somebody might wonder why I keep bringing him up.
Maybe they think I’ve already told his story enough times.
Maybe they think I should move on.
But here’s the thing.
I don’t really care.
I’m going to bring him up.
Even if I’m the only person who does.
Because I still consider Connor my friend.
My history with Connor was complicated.
Especially toward the end.
It wasn’t some perfect friendship where everything was sunshine and rainbows. There were disagreements. There were hurt feelings. There were things that happened between us that made our relationship rocky.
I’m not going to rewrite history just because he died.
But I’m also not going to rewrite history in the other direction and pretend that the difficult parts somehow erased the friendship.
They didn’t.
Connor was my friend.
And I still consider him one.
That’s why I am bringing him up again.
Connor died from fentanyl contamination.
And if the current reporting about Hayden is ultimately confirmed, then her death may have involved something frighteningly similar: someone potentially believing they were taking one substance while unknowingly being exposed to fentanyl.
That distinction matters.
There is a tendency to talk about overdose deaths in incredibly simplistic terms.
Someone took drugs.
They overdosed.
That’s it.
But that doesn’t necessarily tell us what happened.
Someone can have a history of addiction and still not know exactly what they are consuming.
Someone can believe they are taking one drug and unknowingly receive another.
Someone can make a decision that carries risks without understanding just how lethal those risks actually are.
And that is one of the horrifying realities of fentanyl contamination.
This isn’t me saying that addiction isn’t real.
It isn’t me saying that people don’t make decisions that put themselves in danger.
It isn’t me saying that illegal drugs are somehow safe.
It’s simply me saying that we shouldn’t assume we know someone’s entire story based on the fact that fentanyl was involved in their death.
And that’s why Connor comes to mind for me.
I’ve talked about Connor before.
And I’m probably going to talk about him again.
Because that’s what remembering people looks like sometimes.
It isn’t always a formal memorial.
It isn’t always a dedicated anniversary post.
Sometimes somebody else’s story reminds you of them.
Sometimes a celebrity dies and you think about a friend.
Sometimes a video game character brings back memories of a completely different time in your life.
Sometimes a news story connects two things in your brain that nobody else would ever think to connect.
And that’s okay.
Actually, I think it’s important.
This is a mental-health blog, after all.
And mental health isn’t some isolated compartment of our lives.
Our memories are connected.
Our emotions are connected.
Our experiences are connected.
Our relationships are connected.
Our grief is connected to everything else we’ve experienced.
We don’t get to decide exactly when something will remind us of someone we’ve lost.
And we shouldn’t necessarily have to.
Hayden Panettiere was a real person before she became a headline about her death.
She was more than the circumstances surrounding her passing.
For me, I will always have that connection to her through Kairi and Xion, through Kingdom Hearts, and through the memories I have of experiencing those characters.
That’s the piece of her work that made her part of my own life, even though I never knew her personally.
Connor was a real person too.
And I knew Connor personally.
That’s an important distinction, but it doesn’t make either person’s life less worthy of remembrance.
I don’t want Hayden’s death to become nothing more than a discussion about fentanyl.
And I don’t want Connor’s life to become nothing more than a discussion about how he died.
They were people.
They had lives.
They had relationships.
They had people who loved them.
They had people who knew them.
They had good moments and bad moments.
They were complicated human beings.
And I think we should be allowed to remember people that way.
You can acknowledge someone’s struggles without reducing them to those struggles.
You can acknowledge someone’s mistakes without deciding that those mistakes are all they were.
And you can acknowledge that your relationship with someone became difficult without pretending you never cared about them.
That’s where I am with Connor.
Our history was complicated.
But he was still my friend.
And I still care that he died.
I still care about how he died.
And I still care about remembering him.
So yes, I’m bringing Connor up again.
Why?
Because Hayden’s death made me think of him.
Because Kingdom Hearts made Hayden part of my life in a small but meaningful way.
Because fentanyl contamination is something that has already taken someone I knew.
Because if the reporting about Hayden is ultimately confirmed, then her story is another reminder of just how terrifyingly unpredictable fentanyl can be.
And because Connor mattered to me.
Maybe somebody reading this thinks the whole thing is a strange collection of subjects.
Hayden Panettiere.
Kingdom Hearts.
Kairi.
Xion.
Fentanyl.
Connor.
Friendship.
Grief.
Mental health.
Why put all of those things together?
Because they’re connected in my mind.
And this is my blog.
I don’t need every post to fit into a perfectly marketable category.
I don’t need to pretend that my thoughts arrive in organized little folders.
They don’t.
Sometimes one thing leads to another.
Sometimes the connections are obvious to me even if they aren’t obvious to anyone else.
And sometimes following those connections is exactly how I process something.
That’s important.
Because mental health isn’t always about having the perfect explanation for why you’re feeling something.
Sometimes it’s about allowing yourself to acknowledge that you’re feeling it.
This is what I’m feeling.
This is what this news made me think about.
This is who I remembered.
And this is why I’m writing about it.
I knew Connor.
He was my friend.
Things got complicated.
Things got rocky.
But none of that changes the fact that he was part of my life.
And I refuse to believe that remembering someone has an expiration date.
So I’ll keep remembering him.
Even if I’m the only one.
Because somebody has to.
And if that somebody is me, then that’s okay.
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