Jessica Waite’s perfect marriage failed long before her husband’s abrupt death. She just didn’t know.
Her idyllic life came crashing down when Sean, her husband of 17 years, died suddenly of a heart attack during a business trip to Texas.
Then, as Jessica grieving through funeral preparations and struggling to care for her nine-year-old son, her world turned upside down for the second time.
Just days after Sean’s death, Jessica discovered that he had been hiding a disturbing secret.
Lying in bed at her home in Calgary, Canada, she opened Sean’s iPad to look up the phone number of the Houston hospital where his body was stored.
Jessica Waite’s perfect marriage failed long before her husband’s abrupt death. She just didn’t know.
But Jessica only got as far as typing ‘Ho’ when the search window automatically filled with the words: ‘Houston Escorts.’
Confused, she scrolled through her search history and a stream of disturbing past queries appeared: “locations… girls… services… prices.”
Over the next few months, Jessica would discover that the man she had considered a loyal husband had been a relentless user of prostitutes, had numerous affairs, and had often worked all night to curate an extensive 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 center of Jessica’s remarkable testimony is Sean’s descent into a very modern abyss: an all-consuming interest in Internet-fueled sex and pornography that consumed him and, almost, Jessica herself as she struggled to face the truth.
Pornography had “cannabalized” their relationship, he writes: “The world Sean built on the surface—his career, our family, our beautiful home—all matched in size and scope with his underground activity.”
However, one of the most notable aspects of Jessica’s story is the fact that she somehow managed to forgive him.
After all, there were good times.
Jessica and Sean met while working as teachers abroad in Japan when she was 24 and he was 28. They married in July 1998 and returned to Canada to raise their son, Dash.
Sean took a job as a manager at a company in Denver, Colorado, and stayed there in his bachelor pad for three weeks straight while Jessica maintained the family home in Calgary.
Despite the distance and occasional fights, they were happy, or at least Jessica thought they were.
After the shock of the iPad reveal, the next blow came when trying to deal with a series of overdue credit card bills from Sean’s work trips, which seemed to involve expensive hotels and room service.
Jessica requested itemized receipts from the hotels in hopes of being able to claim thousands of dollars from Sean’s employer.
But the receipts, when they arrived, were damning: breakfasts for two, bottles of Prosecco, everything arranged in pairs.
Horrified, Jessica went to a mutual friend and explained that she suspected Sean had brought escorts to her room.
Confused, she scrolled through her search history and a stream of disturbing past queries appeared: “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: she revealed that Sean had confided in her that he had also had an affair with someone he had met at work.
As Jessica explains in the book, the truth began to overwhelm her and drive her crazy. One day, as she struggled to contain her growing rage, she opened the bag containing Sean’s ashes, took them to her garden and mixed some of it with dog feces, before throwing the sordid mixture into the trash.
“I have desecrated the remains of my life partner,” he reflects. But then, desperate and guilty, he took more ashes and, in fact, ate them.
“The remains feel dry to the touch, coarser than baking powder, more grainy than salt,” he says in one of the strangest tasting notes you’ll ever read. ‘They mix with the watery water, a mineral mud on the back of my tongue. Drink.’
She admits, tellingly, to having been “detached from reality after Sean’s death.”
There was even more humiliation in store. When Jessica traveled to Denver to clean out Sean’s bachelor pad, she found a hard drive.
Plugging it into his computer, she discovered that he had created countless electronic folders filled with hundreds of hours of pornography, all carefully labeled and categorized by age, race, and source.
She would go so far as to describe it as the ‘Porn Matrix’.
Jessica was able to establish that her late husband had dedicated so much time to the project that he had often stayed up until the early hours of the morning.
“During bad times, Sean would often be working in ‘the matrix’ between 2 and 5 in the morning,” he writes. “And some nights it was like that for up to five hours.”
Taken in happier times: A family photo from Jessica Waite’s website showing late husband Sean and son Dash.
Jessica spent hours going through the file, trying to understand what the hell had been going through her husband’s head. He only stopped when he started to worry that Sean’s porn was rewiring his own brain.
She writes about how she was in the audience at a high school play when, disturbingly, she found herself imagining one of the school actresses naked.
Jessica briefly fantasized about committing suicide, writing, “I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t imagined how good it would feel, fading into nothing.”
But that was a turning point. Realizing that she had to focus on protecting her son Dash, Jessica began seeking psychological help, including advice from a spirit medium.
Nine years later, countless questions about Sean’s actions and motives remain unanswered, but Jessica says she has finally made peace with his betrayals and death.
‘He was not just a liar, a cheat and a traitor. He was a good son who loved and honored his parents,” he insists. ‘He was a loving father to Dash. His colleagues respected him.”
Some shadows remain. A few years ago, Dash found a specially constructed secret compartment in Sean’s workbench, built to hide the weed that Sean swore he didn’t smoke.
“But Dash still has good memories of his father, a context for the hard things, and the best of Sean’s example to draw from,” he writes.
Jessica has now met someone else and is trying to help others deal with their pain and learn to accept it.
“In the long run, grief has helped me find support,” Jessica concludes, “not just within the people I love, but within this whole vast, mysterious world.”
However, some scars have never gone away and, from the looks 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 inside Sean did.”