Jessica Waite’s perfect marriage perished long before the abrupt death of her husband. She just didn’t know it.
Her idyllic life came crashing down when Sean, her husband of 17 years, died suddenly from a heart attack on a business trip to Texas.
Then, as Jessica waded grief-stricken through funeral arrangements and struggled to care for their nine-year-old son, her world was upended for a second time.
It was just days after Sean’s death that Jessica discovered he’d been hiding a disturbing secret.
Lying in bed at home in Calgary, Canada, she opened Sean’s iPad to search for the phone number of the Houston hospital where his body was being stored.
Jessica Waite’s perfect marriage perished long before the abrupt death of her husband. She just didn’t know it.
But Jessica only made it as far as typing ‘Ho’ when the search window auto-filled with the words: ‘Houston escorts’.
Confused, she scrolled through the search history – and a stream of disturbing past queries flashed up: ‘locations… girls… services… prices’.
Over the following months, Jessica would discover that the man she’d thought of as a loyal husband had been a relentless user of prostitutes, had conducted numerous affairs – and had frequently worked through the night to curate a sprawling collection of depraved images on his personal computer.
The industrial scale of Sean’s infidelity and obsession, perpetrated over so many years, is revealed in Jessica’s extraordinary new book, ‘The Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards’.
In some ways, the betrayal of their marriage is the oldest story in the world.
Jessica’s idyllic life came crashing down when Sean, her husband of 17 years, died.
But at the heart of Jessica’s remarkable testimony is Sean’s descent into a very modern abyss: an all-absorbing interest in internet-driven sex and pornography which consumed him and, very nearly, Jessica herself as she struggled to confront the truth.
Porn had ‘cannabalized’ their relationship, she writes: ‘The world Sean built on the surface – his career, our family, our beautiful home – all of that was matched in size and scope by his subterranean activity.’
Yet, one of the most remarkable aspects of Jessica’s story is the fact that she somehow managed to forgive him.
There had been good times, after all.
Jessica and Sean first met while working as teachers abroad in Japan when she was 24 and he was 28. They married in July 1998, moving back to Canada to raise their son, Dash.
Sean took a job as a manager at a company in Denver, Colorado, staying in his bachelor pad there for three weeks at a time while Jessica maintained the family home in Calgary.
Despite the distance and occasional rows, they were happy, or at least Jessica thought they were.
After the shock of the iPad revelation, the next blow came when she attempted to deal with a series of overdue credit card bills for Sean’s work trips, which seemed to involve expensive hotels and room service.
Jessica requested itemized receipts from the hotels in the hope she could claim thousands of dollars back from Sean’s employer.
But the receipts, when they arrived, were damning: breakfasts for two, bottles of Prosecco, everything ordered in pairs.
In horror, Jessica went to a mutual friend and explained she suspected Sean had brought escorts back to his room.
Confused, she scrolled through the search history – and a stream of disturbing past queries flashed up: ‘locations… girls… services… prices’.
The industrial scale of Sean’s infidelity and obsession, perpetrated over so many years, is revealed in Jessica’s extraordinary new book, ‘The Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards’.
But the friend had more bad news for her, revealing that Sean had confided that he’d also been having an affair with someone he’d met through work.
As Jessica explains in the book, the truth began to overwhelm her – driving her mad. One day, as she battled to contain her mounting fury, she cut open the bag containing Sean’s ashes, carried them into her garden and mixed a portion of them with dog’s feces – before throwing the sordid mixture into the trash.
‘I’ve desecrated the remains of my partner in life,’ she reflects. But then, in despair and guilt, took more of his ashes – and actually ate them.
‘The remains feel dry against my fingertips, coarser than baking powder, grainier than salt,’ she says in one of the strangest set of tasting notes you’re ever likely to read. ‘They mix with the teary water, a mineral mud on the back of my tongue. I swallow.’
She admits, tellingly, to having been ‘detached from reality in the wake of Sean’s death.’
There was yet more humiliation in store. When Jessica traveled to Denver to clear out Sean’s bachelor apartment, she found a hard drive.
Plugging it into her computer, she discovered he had created countless electronic folders filled with hundreds of hours-worth of pornography, all painstakingly labelled and categorized by age, race and source.
She would come to describe it as the ‘Matrix of Porn’.
Jessica was able to establish that her late husband had lavished so much time on the project, he had often sat up through the small hours of the night.
‘During bad spells Sean would often be up working on “the matrix” between 2am and 5am,’ she writes. ‘And some nights he was at it for up to five hours.’
Taken in happier times – a family picture from Jessica Waite’s website showing late husband Sean and son Dash
Jessica spent hours going through the archive, trying to understand what on earth had been in her husband’s head. She stopped only when she began to worry that Sean’s pornography was rewiring her own brain.
She writes how she had been in the audience at a high school play when, disturbingly, she found herself imagining one of the schoolgirl actresses naked.
Jessica briefly fantasized about killing herself, writing that, ‘I’d be lying if I said I haven’t imagined how good it would feel, fading into nothing.’
But that was a turning point. Realizing she had to concentrate on protecting her son Dash, Jessica began to seek psychological help, including advice from a spiritual medium.
Nine years on, countless questions about Sean’s actions and motives remain unanswered, but Jessica says she has finally reached peace with his betrayals and his death.
‘He wasn’t only a liar and a cheater and a betrayer. He was a good son who loved and honored his parents,’ she insists. ‘He was a loving father to Dash. He was respected by his colleagues.’
Some shadows remain. A few years ago, Dash found a specially-built secret compartment in Sean’s workbench – built to conceal the weed that Sean swore he didn’t smoke.
‘But Dash still has good memories of his dad, and context for the tough stuff and the best of Sean’s example to draw from,’ she writes.
Jessica has now met someone else and is trying to help others address their grief and learn to accept it.
‘Over the long term, grief has helped me find purchase,’ Jessica concludes, ‘not just inside the people I love, but within this whole vast and mysterious world.’
Some scars have never gone away however and, by the sound of it, never will.
‘I feel better and stronger than before, but I still cry almost every day, and I still feel like a part of me has died,’ she writes. ‘Because the part of me that existed within Sean did.’
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