He’s one of the funniest people in the world. Patton Oswalt is an accomplished comedian, writer and actor. In 2007, he was the voice of Remy in Pixar’s Ratatouille.
But for the last year, Oswalt has not spent time being funny, or writing scripts. No, his time has been spent picking up the pieces, and navigating a life without his late wife and partner in crime, Michelle McNamara.
McNamara passed away suddenly in her sleep on April 21, 2016. The 46-year-old crime-writing author had been married to Oswalt for 11 years, and the couple has an eight-year-old daughter, Alice.
Though Oswalt has been almost completely silent this past year, there is one thing he has openly written about—his struggle with grief, and adjusting to life as a single parent.
Oswalt has penned a handful of painfully honest letters on his Facebook page, sharing his experience for the sake of overcoming some of his own feelings, but also relating to those who are familiar with the dark world of grief.
Now, on the one-year anniversary of his wife’s death, Oswalt took to Facebook once again to update fans on his journey—the things he’s gone through, and where he finds himself today writing, “It’s awful, but it’s not fatal.”
“That’s the dispatch I’m sending back from exactly one year into this shadow-slog. A year ago today — an hour from now, I’m just realizing — I came back from dropping Alice off at school. I’d let Michelle sleep in. Got our daughter dressed and ready for school — lunch packed, class folder in her backpack. I stopped on the way home to buy Michelle an Americano and left it on her bedside table around 9:30 am. Went up to my office, did some writing, answered some e-mails, Tweeted some thoughts on Prince dying. There was an art show at Alice’s school in the afternoon and my wife and I were going to go, get dragged around the room by Alice as she chattered about her artwork and the work of her classmates. Except instead I came back down into the house and the life i knew was gone.”
Oswalt elaborates on his “one year” into that new life, saying he could have never imagined it would have happened to him.
“Last night I took off my wedding ring. I couldn’t bear removing it since April 21st, 2016. But now it felt obscene. That anonymous poem about the man mourning his dead lover for a year and a day, for craving a kiss from her “clay cold lips.” I was inviting more darkness. Removing the ring was removing the last symbol of denial of who I was now, and what my life is, and what my responsibilities are.
But it’s not fatal.”
He put the ring into a little box he’d made years ago before he and Michelle were married. When he first constructed it, Oswalt filled the box with “random trinkets” and reminders of the life they shared leading up to marriage.