Patton Owsalt shares a heartbreaking tribute to his wife after she suddenly died at 46
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Comedian Patton Oswalt looked back on the life of his wife, author Michelle McNamara, who died suddenly on April 14, in a new piece he wrote for Time.
"She hasn’t left a void. She’s left a blast crater,” he wrote.
Oswalt touched on his wife’s achievements, which included how her true crime writing on the blog TrueCrimeDiary.com led to her writing a story on “The Golden State Killer” (a name McNamara coined), which then led to a HarperCollins book deal on the subject.
He also touched on McNamara’s social work and collaboration with a young Michelle Obama in the early 1990s.
"I loved her,” Oswalt wrote. “This is the first time I’ve been able to use ‘I’ writing this. Probably because there hasn’t been much of an ‘I’ since the morning of April 21. There probably won’t be for a while. Whatever there is belongs to my daughter—to our daughter. Alice.”
He also shared the moving quote from his and his late wife's daughter Alice:
"Five days after Michelle was gone, Alice and I were half-awake at dawn, after a night of half-sleeping. Alice sat up in bed. Her face was silhouetted in the dawn light of the bedroom windows. I couldn’t see her expression. I just heard her voice: 'When your mom dies you’re the best memory of her. Everything you do and say is a memory of her.'"
No cause of death has been given. McNamara was 46 years old.
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