Do the dead deserve privacy? That was one important question Jessica Waite, 52, needed to answer to write her provocatively titled non-fiction book, The Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards. An even more salient question for the Calgary-based author: Can the living experience healing and reconciliation without truth-telling, even if it discredits those who can no longer speak for themselves? In Waite’s case, the answer to both questions was no.
Part memoir and part self-help manual – with a dash of the paranormal and a heap of humour and heart – Widow’s Guide soars on her candour about a harrowing experience. “I have joked that if the dead want full privacy, they should settle their credit card bills before they die,” Waite says, exhibiting the bruising wry humour that offsets the heartbreak and betrayal she unflinchingly chronicles. “What we do affects other people.”
Waite’s husband Sean was a hard-charging, fast-rising executive in tech. He was also a caring husband, devoted father to the couple’s nine-year-old son, Dash, a wildly popular colleague and beloved sibling to four brothers and a sister. On Nov. 4, 2015, Sean dropped dead of a heart attack in a Houston airport. He was 47.
The couple had been together for 20 years, after they met in Osaka in 1995 where both were teaching English. Their marriage, though loving, had very rough patches. Sean, as Waite writes, “struggled with bipolar and OCD tendencies,” triggering dramatic episodes of caustic behaviour. Sean had never been formally diagnosed, but Waite confirms in an interview that “both of us have mental illness in our family, so I can speculate … with a fair degree of confidence. If he had had proper diagnosis, it might have been a different outcome.”
With the family’s sole breadwinner deceased and insurance claims to be settled, the newly widowed, stay-at-home mother, then 44, was left in “dire financial straits.” Then, a statement arrived for a secret, high-limit credit card with a $35,000 balance. “The bottom drops out of my stomach,” she writes. “I check the statement to see if there have been any transactions since Sean’s death. Nothing.”
She saw that “some of those hotel bills seem pretty high. If they’re business expenses, maybe I can claim them back.” They’re not. Waite’s requests for itemized hotel receipts “painted a nauseating picture: free-flowing Prosecco and breakfasts for two; numerous single cups of coffee ordered for $17 apiece.”
Worse, much worse, was to come: Waite discovered that Sean had a staggering cache of porn on devices in their Calgary home and in the apartment he occupied in Denver, where his company was located.
Waite had suspected Sean was romantically involved with a co-worker, whom she names “Rebekah” in Widow’s Guide. (Waite uses the real names of Sean’s family, with their assent, throughout the book, only using pseudonyms for those who are “unflatteringly represented.”) She later found out there was at least one other woman in Sean’s office who was sexually involved with him.
But a search through his iPad also revealed extensive searches for “Houston escorts” as well as a “browser history [listing] porn site after porn site.” This had apparently been going on for years. As she dug deeper into the physical and digital remnants of Sean’s life, the man Waite thought she married turned out to be multilayered, but certainly not in the way most wives would hope.
In Widow’s Guide, the author details the tribulations of revealing what she unearthed about Sean to his close-knit family and friends, while trying to come to terms with her husband’s disloyalty and unknown sexual impulses (amid the more quotidian details of organizing Sean’s return to Canada, his funeral, and scattering of his ashes).
One of the book’s frankest admissions is that, in an effort to rekindle their flagging sex life, she suggested to Sean that they open their marriage to other partners. “It’s a hard pass,” Waite writes, “but in the meantime, he is full-on extracurricular. Why steal something that’s offered to you as a gift?” The posthumous answer given by one of Sean’s friends and corroborated by his cherished brother Ty is that “the person Sean was with me was the man he wanted to be. Opening up the relationship would mean acknowledging this other part of him existed.”
As she set about the grieving process and coming to terms with these disclosures, she started to experience unexplained phenomena: things turning off and on by themselves, and spiritualists who claimed to feel Sean’s presence in a room or who knew highly personal stories she had never revealed to anyone. And she begrudgingly suspects these were messages from beyond the grave. Eventually, Waite agreed to attend a ceremonial smudging ceremony — thought to foster healing — to learn how to replicate the process herself. Lisa, the woman leading the ceremony, “wheels around and looks right into my eyes. ‘Did your husband die? He’s here right now,’” Waite recounts. “Lisa then says, ‘Did you feel that? He’s hugging you.’
“What I felt was not a hug. It was a slight chill and a sense of disorientation. And I wouldn’t even want a hug from Sean, especially in the middle of a group lesson.”
Waite admits she was fearful of recounting the paranormal stuff in the final manuscript. “I thought it might discredit me or that people would underestimate the rigour with which I pursued plausible explanations,” she says. “But I think it will resonate with people who have also experienced this.”
Waite had to consider her son Dash, now 18, and his feelings when writing Widow’s Guide, which took seven years to complete. She says she negotiated with her publisher to hold back publication until he finished high school, to mitigate potential backlash from his peers. The writing itself was cathartic, though, even if it was initially done in secret so as not to expose Dash to anything age-inappropriate. (“I didn’t leave my journals lying around,” she says.)
As for the troubling content Waite reveals about Dash’s father, Waite says: “Dash is secure in his friendships and feels supported. That said, he is a teenage boy, so there could be things he feels that he doesn’t disclose to me,” she laughs. “But from what he has told me, he is OK.”
Ultimately, Waite says Dash recognized how critical the book was for her healing process. That his extended paternal family was onboard certainly helped. Indeed, Waite’s niece, Ryan Waite, a professional animator in Toronto, even created a trailer for the book, which the author “absolutely loves.”
On the cusp of the memoir’s Canadian and U.S. publication, Waite, whose previous essays and short stories have been anthologized in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K., is “excited and terrified,” adding that “a good friend whose wife died last November said, ‘You’ve written the Wealthy Barber of grief.’ The takeaway is to tend to yourself first.”
Finishing the book and “bringing it into the world has been the most amazing thing.
“It’s not like death stops what’s going on in the world,” she says. “For the living, if reconciliation needs to happen and truth is part of that, I strongly feel that for the sake of healing it’s important to be able to tell the truth,” Waite adds, speaking just days after the shocking revelation that late writer Alice Munro’s daughter was sexually abused by her stepfather. (Munro stayed with him anyway.) Even gold-plated legacies can be precarious things when vigilantly guarded secrets start seeping out.
