The death of Hayden Panettiere hit me harder than any passing death before. I’m 41. I’ve been through a few.

Yes, she was extraordinarily talented. She was beautiful. She had that strange quality some performers have where your eyes simply followed her whenever she appeared on screen.

But my reaction isn’t really about Hayden’s star power. Nor is it about my relationship with her public persona – I saw myself in Hayden Panettiere.

When she began speaking publicly about postpartum depression and when Nashville gave Juliette Barnes a storyline that echoed so much of what Hayden herself was experiencing, I remember thinking: Someone is finally showing it.

Not the gauzy version of motherhood we sell women. Not the exhausted-but-glowing mother who just needs a nap, a casserole, and perhaps a little more help from her husband.

The other version. The terrifying one. The version where you have a baby and something inside you disappears. I knew that version because I had lived it.

I had postpartum psychosis. There was addiction. Severe depression. Abuse. Domestic violence. Trauma that would follow me for nearly 20 years and, if I’m being truthful, still follows me in some ways.

And nobody knew what to do with me. Not family. Not doctors. Not friends.

Maybe they didn’t understand. Maybe they didn’t want to understand. Maybe understanding would have required them to confront something much more uncomfortable than the idea that I was simply a “bad mother.”

So I disappeared into an abyss. Eventually, I decided my child would be safer with their father because I knew I was not safe. It remains one of the most painful decisions of my life and one of the decisions people understand the least.

But sometimes motherhood does not look like holding on. Sometimes loving your child means letting go.

I have only recently been able to speak with my child more consistently and begin rebuilding a relationship I cut short because, at the time, leaving was the only way I knew how to be a good mother.

Then I watched Hayden Panettiere. She spoke publicly about postpartum depression. She spoke about addiction. She spoke about relinquishing custody of her daughter while trying to survive. She later wrote openly about how alcohol became intertwined with her postpartum suffering and how her own life became eerily entangled with her Nashville character Juliette Barnes.

I saw her. And somewhere deep inside me, I hoped other people might see her too. Maybe they would watch Juliette Barnes unravel or hear Hayden Panettiere talk about what happened to her and eventually connect the dots back to women like me.

Maybe somebody from my past would stop for a second and think, Wait. Maybe what happened to her wasn’t a moral failure. Maybe she was sick. And maybe we failed her.

The Latina Mother Is Supposed to Endure

There is another layer to this for me as a Latina. I grew up absorbing a very specific mythology about motherhood. Motherhood was beautiful. Sacred. Instinctive. It was sacrifice and legacy and family.

And somewhere inside all of that was another lesson: keep certain things inside. Don’t embarrass the family. Have the babies. Keep everybody together. Eventually graduate into abuelahood with a chancleta in your hand as the walking stereotype of Latina womanhood.

Nobody told me my baby could come out of my body and all the love and energy I had felt during pregnancy could pour out with them.

Nobody told me I might blink and suddenly wonder: Who am I now? Why does everything seem grey? And perhaps the most horrifying question of all: Why don’t I feel the way everyone told me a mother is supposed to feel?

Those questions become even more dangerous when they collide with race, culture, and a healthcare system that’s already determined only some people’s pain deserves attention.

A recent systematic review found that perinatal depression affects roughly one in seven women in the United States and concluded that perinatal Latinas experience some of the highest prevalence while facing some of the lowest rates of screening and treatment.

That disparity is not new. Research involving nearly 30,000 Medicaid recipients found that only 5% of Latinas in the study initiated postpartum mental health care compared with 9% of white women. Even after Latinas entered treatment, they were less likely to receive follow-up and continuing care. And more recent research tells essentially the same story.

That is a systems failure. And systems are very good at disguising their failures as personal shame.

I Could Have Been Her

Hayden Panettiere died at 36. That number has been haunting me. Because now I am acutely aware that I could have been her at 36.

Or 24.

Or 26.

Or 27.

Or 40.

There are multiple versions of my life where I don’t make it to 41. And that realization has made Hayden’s death feel less like the distant tragedy of a famous person and more like encountering a ghost from a timeline I narrowly escaped.

We do not yet know the details around her death. What we do know is what Hayden Panettiere chose to tell us while she was alive: she struggled with postpartum depression, addiction, mental health, and abuse. She tried to recover. She tried to rebuild. She talked about it publicly.

She told us.

That is the part I cannot stop thinking about.

She told us.

And if a wealthy, famous white woman can speak openly about postpartum mental illness and addiction and still move through a world so poorly equipped to hold that suffering, what does that tell us about the Latina mother whose doctor doesn’t listen? The Black mother whose symptoms are dismissed? The undocumented mother afraid to seek help? The poor mother who cannot disappear into a treatment facility because disappearing means losing her job, her housing, or her children?

Visibility alone cannot fix a system that has already decided suffering is a personal defect. Hayden’s death feels like the loss of someone who made this particular kind of pain visible. Because we wanted to love our children too.

God, we wanted to love them.

We wanted the feeling everyone promised us. Other people watched us spiral and called the spiral who we were. It wasn’t. It isn’t. We needed help, not shame.

I hope someday we build a world where a mother can say, I don’t feel right. I don’t feel safe. I am afraid of what is happening inside my own mind, and the response is not judgment, shame, or punishment.

I’m so sorry, Hayden.

I saw you.

I just wish seeing you had been enough.