When someone who loved you but could no longer be with you writes a tribute, it’s emotionally painful. After Hayden Panettiere‘s death, Wladimir Klitschko posted on Instagram, but he didn’t write like a famous person trying to keep up appearances. He wrote like someone who had lived with someone, raised a child with her, and stood back and watched as she fought battles he couldn’t fight for her.
She died in Greenville, South Carolina, on a Sunday afternoon. Sixty-six. Around 1:50 p.m., someone called 911 to say that someone was having a cardiac arrest at an apartment complex. The next day, an autopsy was done. There were no signs of trauma, but the official cause of death was still unknown until more research was done. It’s still not clear what happened in those last hours, and maybe that doesn’t matter as much as what the life had to offer.
Klitschko, a former heavyweight champion and brother of Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, paid a respectful but deeply personal tribute. He said this about Panettiere: “She is an important part of my life and the mother of our daughter Kaya.”That phrase—not just an ex, not just a former partner, but someone who filled a certain, unfillable space—says more in a few words than most eulogies do in a whole essay.
They had been together for years before they announced they were getting married in 2013. From what everyone said, their relationship was based on real feelings, not celebrity dance moves. It was in 2014 that their daughter Kaya Evdokia Klitschko was born. In her autobiography This Is Me: A Reckoning, Panettiere wrote about that time as the time when her life began to fall apart slowly and then all at once. It was there when I gave birth, and it stayed. Then addiction set in. After getting engaged, they broke up in 2018, and she gave Klitschko custody of Kaya before their daughter was three years old.
Reading that timeline makes me feel a certain kind of grief. During this time, Panettiere was open about how painful it was not having her daughter close by, including in a tearful appearance on the Jay Shetty Podcast earlier this year. “I want her here all the time.” “I miss her all the time,” she said. It wasn’t giving up. It was a mother who had to live with an impossible choice every day. She tried to be a part of Kaya’s life through video calls and trips to Ukraine.
What’s interesting about Klitschko’s tribute is that it doesn’t sound angry. He showed a picture of Kaya sitting on her mom’s shoulders, and the two of them looked happy. He promised their daughter that he would always be polite to her mother. That’s not a little thing. It would have been easier and maybe even more understandable to say less, especially after a painful breakup or when addiction or depression played a part. Instead, he said that Panettiere had “built an incredible career through immense talent, while also facing the darker sides of a very demanding industry.”
Panettiere began working in the business as a child, steadily making her way through TV and movies until she got roles that made her famous for a generation. Sarah Claire Bennet in Heroes. Nashville to see Juliette Barnes. Because she was so good at what she did, it looked easy, which can be a trap because it makes it harder for people to believe you’re struggling.
In a way, the memoir she wrote a few months before she died was her attempt to bridge the gap between how people saw her and how she really felt. It told the truth about addiction, domestic violence, postpartum depression, and getting better. It was the kind of book that you need to be brave to write and even braver to put out there.
Finally, Klitschko said something that stays with you: “Young and talented people like Hayden should not leave this world so soon.” It’s possible that he wasn’t just talking as a sad ex-partner, but also as a father who needs to tell his daughter that she still had a lot of time to spend with her mother.
