Patton Oswalt previously remarked of breaking the news of his wife’s death to his then-7-year-old daughter, Alice Rigney, that “I had to look at this little child who was everything to me and take everything from her.”
He used material from his standup performance, Annihilation, to depict him looking at this little soul and shattering her world as she knew it.
Despite the comedic overtones, the comic contextualized these statements to show that the agony behind them was as real as it was for you and me.
Michelle McNamara’s Untimely Death
Michelle McNamara, Oswalt’s first wife and the mother of his kid, died on April 21, 2016, according to The Guardian. When the comedian discovered her no longer breathing, she was sleeping in her bed. Paramedics were dispatched to the scene, but she was pronounced dead.
McNamara had a cardiac issue, which, when combined with a cocktail of prescription pharmaceuticals, including the amphetamine Adderall, the opioid painkiller fentanyl, and the anti-anxiety pill Xanax, proved fatal for the mother of one.
That dreadful day would go down in history as the second-worst day of his life. It came in second to his telling his daughter the next morning that her mother was no longer with them.
Patton Oswalt is now the only parent of his daughter
Oswalt became a widower and a single father overnight. God’s plan made no sense to him, thus he doesn’t believe in Him.
You’ve got this true-crime detective, this genius on the trail of these cold cases, and then you’ve got a guy who delivers [crap] jokes, and you’re going to take one of them? Being a parent to his 7-year-old, on the other hand, was his saving grace, and she was his rock.
If it hadn’t been for Alice, Oswalt freely claimed that he would have “eaten to live and then drunk so that I didn’t feel anything any longer and then repeated it every single day.”
Patton Oswalt’s Grieving Journey
Years later, when Oswalt had married another woman and found Alice a stepmother, he told People about his grief process. He revealed that he made it a point to deal with his sadness and despair in solitude, rather than in front of Alice. She’d had her fill of adversity.
The single father didn’t want his daughter to remember him as a parent who was even more despondent than she was.
He went on to say, “I don’t think that’s a good basis to grow up on.”
Alice, too, was in mourning. During one of their late-night discussions, he remembered her saying something particularly heartbreaking.
When your mother passes away, everything you do becomes a remembrance of her. You’re a relic of hers. You are her recollection.
Alice and her stepmother were getting along swimmingly. As a symbol of strength and happiness, he did what he could to deal with his grief in his own time and simply be there for his daughter.
In November 2017, Oswalt married his second wife, Meredith Salenger. The comedian acknowledged that he and Alice had made it through the gloom in the 2020 interview, four years after his first wife’s sad death.
His daughter and her stepmother had formed a strong bond. They went swimming, watched The Office, and worked on handicraft projects together.
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