Patton Oswalt Relives Horror Of Wife's OD Death — 'I Was Screaming And Vomiting!'
Oct. 18 2017, Published 4:27 p.m. ET
Patton Oswalt made his triumphant return on Tuesday with the premiere of his Netflix comedy special, Annihilation — over a year since his wife's tragic death. In heartbreaking detail, Oswalt goes in-depth about the days immediately following her death, and the continuous struggles he still faces raising his little girl alone.
"This is the hardest part," Oswalt begins. "A year ago I became a widower and I have.... I'm moving along as best I can. You know, I can get up and I can do my job and be a dad, but ugh its not... you know.. it's still... the wound is there. It is healing, it's not shut yet."
Michelle McNamara died unexpectedly in her sleep in April of 2016. As RadarOnline.com previously reported, a combination of drugs taken at once: Adderall, Xanax, and pain medication Fentanyl, led to her death.
"My wife — a true crime writer and researcher — if she heard the phrase she hated the most 'You know everything happens for a reason,' she's like, 'No it f**king doesn't, it's chaos, it's all random, and it's horrifying and if you want to try to reduce the horror and reduce the chaos, be kind. That's all you can do — it's chaos, be kind.' She used to say that all the time. 'It's chaos, be kind.'"
Oswalt then revealed the worst pain he had to endure: telling his now eight-year-old daughter, Alice that she had lost her mom.
"Second worst day of my life was when my wife passed away...that was the second worst day of my life. The worst day of my life was the day after, when I had to tell our daughter my wife passed away when she was at school," an emotional Oswalt recalled. "So in between screaming and vomiting and freaking out, I talked to the school and I told them what happened and what do I do."
The principal suggested to Oswalt to wait until the next day — on a Friday — when the sun was out to tell Alice the news.
"You can't send her off into sleep and that trauma just hits her," the principal told the comedian. "Tomorrow is Friday, keep her out of school and have a fun daddy-daughter morning, and then at noon tell her and be there with her while she works through it...tell her in the sunshine."
Oswalt took the principal's advice.
"So we did it. In the morning, we went and had fun and then, ugh, I sat down. I sat down with my daughter and then I looked...I looked at my daughter and destroyed her world," the 48-year-old said. "I had to look at this little girl that was everything to me, and take everything from her. That's going to be longer for me to recover from then my wife passing away."
Oswalt told his daughter he was willing to do whatever she wanted to help her get through the loss of her mother. If she wanted to travel, they would travel. If she wanted to stay home for three months, she could.
"After she calmed down, she said 'I want to go school on Monday. I want to go school on Monday,'" Oswalt said. "What I realized she was saying was 'I want some normalcy; if my mom were here, I'd be going to school on Monday...even if it's an illusion, I'm going to try and grab a bit of that.'"
Oswalt admitted the difficult time he had two weeks following his wife's death when Mother's Day came along, and he had to keep his daughter from finding out. He would take Alice on a trip for the week so she wouldn't notice.
Summer passed and while Oswalt was taking his daughter to her first day of first grade, he realized he had not visited his wife's grave since the funeral.
"I hadn't visited my wife's grave since the funeral — I just couldn't," Oswalt admitted. "And I go 'God d***it I'm gonna go and visit Michelle's grave; and I'm going to talk to her and I'm going to say this world need not concern you anymore. I got it. You go do what you have to do.'"
Oswalt closed out his special by doing a dirty joke that his late wife loved but that he never told to anyone else.
"That was a bit that I was always working on and could never make it work and it always cracked Michelle up, because she loved sh*t that was so filthy and rude and goofy like that," Oswalt said.
"And right now I'm still wounded and I'm healing; but there's people out there — especially the people in power — I'm sorry to get...I'll just leave you with this. There's some people who want to create wounds that will not heal. That's the turn on for them. So I'm just going to end this by quoting Michelle Eileen McNamara. 'It's chaos, be kind.' Thank you. Good night."
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Oswalt received a standing ovation following his show.
McNamara died at 46 years old.
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