Julia Child - Last Years and Posthumous

Last Years and Posthumous

After the death of her beloved friend Simone Beck, Child relinquished La Pitchoune after a month long stay in June 1992 with her family, her niece, Phila, and close friend and biographer, Noël Riley Fitch. Julia turned the keys over to Jean Fischbacher's sister, just as she and Paul had promised nearly 30 years earlier. Also, in 1992, she spent a month touring Italy. American journalist Bob Spitz spent some time with Julia during that period while he was researching and writing his then working title "History of Eating and Cooking in America." Spitz took notes and made many recordings of his conversations with Child and these later formed the basis of a secondary biography on Julia Child published August 7, 2012 (Knopf) one week before what would have been Child's 100th birthday. Paul, who was ten years older, died in 1994 after living in a nursing home for five years following a series of strokes in 1989.

In 2001, she moved to a retirement community in Santa Barbara, California, donating her house and office to Smith College, which later sold the house. She donated her kitchen, which her husband designed with high counters to accommodate her formidable height, and which served as the set for three of her television series, to the National Museum of American History, where it is now on display. Her iconic copper pots and pans were on display at COPIA in Napa, California, until August 2009 when they were reunited with her kitchen at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.

In 2000, Child received the French Legion of Honour and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000. She was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003. Child also received honorary doctorates from Harvard University, Johnson & Wales University in 1995, her alma mater Smith College, Brown University in 2000, and several other universities.

On August 13, 2004, Julia Child died of kidney failure at her retirement community home, Casa Dorinda, in Montecito, two days before her 92nd birthday. Her last meal was French onion soup. Child ended her last book, My Life in France, with "... thinking back on it now reminds that the pleasures of the table, and of life, are infinite – toujours bon appétit!"