I thought my marriage was perfect. But after my husband died, I discovered his depraved secret life – and felt so angry with anger that I ate his ashes in revenge.

Jessica Waite’s perfect marriage fell apart long before her husband’s abrupt death. She just didn’t know.

Her idyllic life collapsed when Sean, her husband of 17 years, died suddenly of a heart attack during a business trip to Texas.

As Jessica sadly waded through funeral arrangements and struggled to care for their nine-year-old son, her world was turned upside down for a second time.

Just days after Sean’s death, Jessica discovered he was hiding a disturbing secret.

While lying in bed at home in Calgary, Canada, she opened Sean’s iPad to find the phone number for the hospital in Houston where his body was being stored.

Jessica Waite’s perfect marriage fell apart long before her husband’s abrupt death. She just didn’t know.

But Jessica didn’t get as far as typing “Whoa” until the search box automatically filled with the words: “Houston escorts.”

Confused, she scrolled through the search history – and a stream of disturbing past searches appeared: ‘locations… girls… services… prices’.

In the months that followed, Jessica would discover that the man she considered a faithful husband had been a ruthless user of prostitutes, had numerous affairs—and often worked through the night to compile an extensive collection of depraved images on his screen. to set. personal computer.

The industrial scale of Sean’s infidelity and obsession, which has continued for 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-consuming interest in Internet-driven sex and pornography that consumed him and, almost, Jessica herself, as she struggled to face 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 it was rivaled in size and scope by his underground activities.”

Yet one of the most remarkable aspects of Jessica’s story is the fact that she somehow managed to forgive him.

After all, there had been good times.

Jessica and Sean first met while working as a study abroad teacher in Japan when she was 24 and he was 28. They married in July 1998 and moved back to Canada to raise their son Dash.

Sean took a job as a manager at a company in Denver, Colorado, where he stayed in his bachelor pad for three weeks at a time while Jessica maintained the family home in Calgary.

Despite the distance and the occasional argument, they were happy, or so Jessica thought.

After the shock of the iPad reveal, the next blow came when she tried to settle 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 hopes of recovering thousands of dollars from Sean’s employer.

But the receipts on arrival were damning: breakfast for two, bottles of Prosecco, everything ordered in pairs.

Horrified, Jessica went to a mutual friend and explained that she suspected Sean had brought escorts to his room.

Confused, she scrolled through the search history – and a stream of disturbing past searches appeared: ‘locations… girls… services… prices’.

The industrial scale of Sean’s infidelity and obsession, which has continued for 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 had also had an affair with someone he met through work.

As Jessica explains in the book, the truth began to overwhelm her, driving her crazy. One day, as she struggled to contain her mounting anger, she cut open the bag containing Sean’s ashes, carried it to her garden and mixed some of it with dog feces – before throwing the disgusting mixture in the trash.

“I desecrated the remains of my life partner,” she reflects. But then, in desperation and guilt, he took more of his ashes – and actually at them.

“The residue feels dry against my fingertips, coarser than baking powder, grainier than salt,” she says in one of the strangest tasting notes you’ll probably ever read. ‘They mix with the water, a mineral mud on the back of my tongue. I swallow.’

She tellingly admits that after Sean’s death she became ‘detached from reality’.

More humiliation awaited. When Jessica traveled to Denver to clean out Sean’s bachelor apartment, she found a hard drive.

She plugged him into her computer and 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 come to describe it as the ‘Matrix of Porn’.

Jessica was able to determine that her late husband had spent so much time on the project that he often stayed awake until the wee hours of the night.

“During bad periods, Sean was often working on ‘the matrix’ between 2am and 5am,” she writes. “And some nights it would take him five hours.”

Taken in happier times: A family photo from Jessica Waite’s website, showing late husband Sean and son Dash

Jessica spent hours sifting through the archives, trying to understand what on earth was going on in her husband’s head. She only stopped when she started to worry that Sean’s pornography was rewiring her own brain.

She writes about how she was sitting in the audience at a high school play when, disturbingly, she found herself imagining one of the schoolgirls naked.

Jessica briefly fantasized about suicide, writing, “I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t imagined how good it would feel if I disappeared into thin air.”

But that was a turning point. Jessica realized she needed to focus on protecting her son Dash and began seeking psychological help, including advice from a spiritual medium.

Nine years later, countless questions about Sean’s actions and motives remain unanswered, but Jessica says she has finally come to peace with his betrayal and death.

‘He was not only a liar, a cheat and a traitor. He was a good son who loved and honored his parents,” she emphasized. “He was a loving father to Dash. He was respected by his colleagues.”

Some shadows remain. A few years ago, Dash found a purpose-built secret compartment in Sean’s workbench – built to hide the weed Sean swore he wasn’t smoking.

“But Dash still has fond memories of his father, and context for the hard things and Sean’s best example to draw from,” she wrote.

Jessica has now met someone new and is trying to help others process and accept their grief.

“In the long run, grief has helped me find ground,” Jessica concludes, “not just with the people I love, but within this whole vast and mysterious world.”

However, some scars never go away and, from the sounds of it, never will go away.

“I feel better and stronger than before, but I still cry almost every day, and I still feel like part of me has died,” she writes. “Because the part of me that existed in Sean did, too.”