I didn’t expect this one to land the way it did. When I first heard that Nicholas Brendon had passed away yesterday, I felt… nothing, at first. Just a kind of blank pause. And then, slowly, it changed.
I came to Buffy the Vampire Slayer at a very specific moment in my life. I had just given birth to my first child. I was in the hospital, exhausted, scared, my body swollen and unfamiliar to me. Everything felt uncertain in a way that’s hard to explain, unless you’ve been there. I knew I was supposed to be happy. But I was also overwhelmed, a little bit afraid of everything, in pain, and mostly sick and spent.
And somehow, in that space, I met Xander.
Not the hero. Not the chosen one. Just… a person in the room. Someone who didn’t always understand what was happening, who was often afraid, who used humor to cover it, to move through it, to make it bearable.
I recognized that immediately.
There’s a particular kind of presence Xander had. He wasn’t the strongest, or the most powerful, or even the most emotionally steady. But he stayed. He kept showing up, even when he didn’t have the words, even when he got things wrong, even when fear was clearly right there chasing him.
That stayed with me over the years. As something familiar. The idea that you don’t have to be the one with clarity or strength to remain part of the story. That sometimes, staying, however awkwardly, imperfectly, even defensively, is its own kind of participation.
And I think that’s why this loss feels different. Because for many of us, Xander wasn’t just a character we watched. He was a way of seeing a certain kind of person. One who doesn’t always get centered, one who doesn’t always get it right, but who is still there, still trying, still part of things.
So this is just a small moment of acknowledgment. For the actor who carried that presence into the world and made space for that kind of recognition to exist at all. Thank you.
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