Feeding The Good Wolf
I received some offline comments regarding an old post of mine about Hayden Panettiere, who very sadly passed away on August 16, 2026. I might as well post my reply here.
The original post was a story about discovering that my neighbor was kind to animals, and then being invited over for a drink. As you know, I’m a science and tech junkie who’s fairly mass-media illiterate, so it came as quite a surprise to learn that our neighbor was a movie and TV star: she was a very down-to-earth person to talk to. While I included the amusing parts of that evening, I left out some of the heavier moments.
Hayden had an amazing amount of charisma, and a style that made it surprisingly easy to skip past small talk and into real conversational depth. An example: when I finished my beer and they offered another, I said I’d have to refuse, since I’d already had a couple of glasses of wine before showing up, and if I accepted another beer “you guys would think I was an alcoholic.” This got a lot of laughter, disproportionate to my small attempt at a humorous refusal. So I asked something to the effect of “What did I just say?” and that opened a discussion about AA, addiction, and rehab. (It turns out the idea that three or four drinks makes you an alcoholic is hilarious when you’re battling serious addiction.)
At the time of my previous post, I thought it unneighborly to write about what I took to be dirty laundry. I’ve since learned that Hayden was very open about her struggles with addiction. You have to have compassion for someone of such high visibility discussing difficult problems out in the open, in the hope that others might learn from her struggle.
The sad fact is that the last time I saw her, I accidentally made her cry. I went out to the mailboxes, and she was getting her mail too. It was night, a little difficult to see under the streetlights, and we exchanged some small talk. It became clear she was unhappy, and I made some comment to that effect. She asked, “Is it that obvious?” I replied, “I can see it in your face.” Her eyes welled up, she said some nice things about me and the squirrels, and then quickly went back to her condo.
There was more than the usual stream of paparazzi knocking on my door (we were the front unit), and COVID had just started, so I was particularly unfriendly to them. (I know I mistakenly told off at least one of Hayden’s friends coming to visit. If you’re one of her friends and happen to be reading this, I hope you forgive my unfriendliness, and were happy that Hayden had such a high-quality jerk screening out the riff-raff. If you were one of the paparazzi making a living off the unhappiness of another human being, I encourage you to take a moment and deeply reconsider your life’s choices.) A few weeks later I saw movers emptying out her place, so I did a web search and learned that her boyfriend had been arrested for hitting her (hence the extra paparazzi), just a few days before our last meeting. It still makes me sad to think that she likely heard “I can see it in your face” as being about bruising, rather than about the change in her usually smiley disposition.
Hayden introduced me to an allegory about addiction. There is an endless battle that goes on inside all of us, between two wolves. One wolf is bad and the other is good. When you ask which wolf will win, the answer is: the one you feed.
Do me a favor and make sure you’re all feeding the good wolf tonight.
This entry originally posted on FB here. Comments? Find me on Bluesky.