Canadian mom and essayist Jessica Waite has written a memoir that details how she ate the ashes of her husband Sean after discovering that he had led a double life filled with affairs and high-end escorts.
Sean died while on a business trip to Texas in 2015, and Waite learned the sordid details of her husband’s double life as she searched for the phone number of the hospital in Houston, Texas, that was holding his body. Instead, she found his browser history.
The Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards describes how Waite became “detached from reality,” unable to cope with the discovery that her husband of 17 years had led a secret double life. Angry at her spouse’s betrayal, she first mixes Sean’s ashes into dog feces, writing “I’ve desecrated the remains of my partner in life.”
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“But then, in despair and guilt, took more of his ashes—and actually ate them,” she admits. “The remains feel dry against my fingertips, coarser than baking powder, grainier than salt. They mix with the teary water, a mineral mud on the back of my tongue. I swallow.”
Waite uncovered her husband’s secret life after typing “Houston” into the browser on his iPad: The search bar auto-auto-filled “Houston escorts,” the widow recalled, eventually stumbling upon searches for specific escorts, their prices, and locations.
Waite, eventually found that Sean regularly hired escorts and cheated on her with several women. Her late husband was renting an apartment in Colorado, where he would have sex with escorts and other women.
Over the following months, Sean’s widow also discovered that, on the nights her husband was supposedly working late, he was actually downloading hundreds of pornographic videos to his computer, and organizing them into individual desktop folders.
Porn “cannabalized” their relationship. Waite explains: “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.”
Nearly a decade later, Waite says she has found balance.
“He wasn’t only a liar and a cheater and a betrayer. He was a good son who loved and honored his parents,” she said. “He was a loving father to Dash. He was respected by his colleagues.”
