A Canadian widow ate her late husband’s cremated remains after discovering his double life filled with affairs and high-end escorts. Mom and essayist Jessica Waite opens up about eating her spouse’s ashes while processing the loss and lies of husband Sean, who died in 2015 on a business trip in Texas, in her new memoir.
A Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards describes how Waite became “detached from reality,” unable to cope with her husband of 17 years’ secret life and affairs. 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.”
“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 learned the sordid details of his husband’s betrayal as she searched for the phone number of the Houston hospital holding his corpse, but instead found his browser history.
While typing “Houston” into the browser on her husband’s 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.
The widow’s months long investigation also uncovered that, on nights her husband was allegedly working late, he was actually downloading hundreds of pornographic videos to his personal computer, all of which were sorted into unique 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 resolve.
“He wasn’t only a liar and a cheater and a betrayer. He was a good son who loved and honored his parents,” she continued. “He was a loving father to Dash. He was respected by his colleagues.”
