Actor/comedian Patton Oswalt paid tribute to his late wife, true-crime writer Michelle McNamara, Tuesday on Time.com.
McNamara died in her sleep Thursday, April 21, just a week after her 46th birthday.
"The reaction to her passing, the people who are shocked at her senseless absence, is a testament to how she steered her life with joyous, wicked curiosity," he notes. "She hasn't left a void. She's left a blast crater."
He recounted her grad school years, her time working for Michelle Obama in the 1990s and the origins of her blog, TrueCrimeDiary.com and how that parlayed into a Los Angeles Magazine piece —and later, a book — on the "Golden State Killer," the name she bestowed upon the murderer who perpetrated the "worst unsolved string of homicides" in state history. He also wrote of her blog entry which imagined how the 1969 Manson murders would have differed had they taken place in the age of social media.
The shellshocked Patton noted the Time essay marked the first time he'd been able to use the pronoun 'I' since her death. "Probably because there hasn’t been much of an “I” since the morning of April 21. There probably won’t be for a while," he surmised.
The piece ends on a hopeful note, as he recounts watching and listening to their daughter Alice about a week after Michelle's death.
"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. That’s the kind of person Michelle created and helped shape. That was Michelle. That is Michelle."
