The Current - How a widow found out about her husband’s dark secrets

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

When Jessica Waite’s husband died, she found shocking secrets in a box of his belongings. She writes about the anger she felt — and what it meant for her grief — in her memoir The Widow's Guide To Dead Bastards.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. Okay, I think most people are in the room, so let's get started. So what I want to do this morning is to sort of collect ourselves, breathe in, take a deep breath, and I want you to quietly think of your person and say your person's name. So breathe it in, breathe it out, get used to that feeling because we're going to be saying that person's name a lot this weekend. Jodi Skeets is

standing in front of a room of people who have lost their person. She is chair of Soaring Spirits Canada. It's a non-profit organization that runs an event called Camp Widow. This is a weekend to help support people navigating the loss of a partner. And in this hotel conference room last month in Toronto, there are boxes of Kleenex on the floor next to some of the aisles. But Jodi says the weekend is in all tears. There will be moments this weekend where a whole room full of people will be crying and then they will burst out into laughter. It's the most amazing thing to experience profound joy and sadness in the same breath. And you're allowed to do that at Camp Widow because you've been passed. You're not at the end of your joyful moments, but you're allowed to do that at Camp Widow because you've been passed. You're not at the end of your joyful moments, but you're also not at the end of your sad moments. So we do have a lot of Kleenex. We go through a lot of Kleenex at Camp Widow. What you hear at this conference is that grief

can take a lot of forms and everyone has their own story. I was widowed 10 years ago. I was 34. He was 32 and he died in an accident, so it was very sudden and shocking. When I saw other people that were going through this, I always thought, like, I don't know how you do it, right? And then once it happens to you, you're like, you have no choice, you have to. I lost my wife back in February of 2019, and, you know, one of the first things I did was I started Googling, you know, basically, what do I do now and started looking for support groups. And I found Camp Widow. I came down those stairs and I thought, is this going to be a cult? Is this going to be some hippie hugging circles? And I thought, you know what, if nothing else, I'm getting three

days away from the children. And hopefully, if it's not any of those things, then I'm going to have a great time. My wife Karen passed away in 2011 when she was 48 from cancer. One of the things someone here will never ask me is, why are you still coming here? And they will never say, haven't you gotten over her yet? So I find it very healing to come here and help out and also help myself to continue healing. Healing can mean many different things depending on what happened, if the partner died in a traumatic way, perhaps suddenly or unexpectedly,

if you're part of a same-sex couple and people in your life aren't as quick to acknowledge the depth of your loss. And there is a particularly tricky form of complex grief that comes when your relationship was complex. There are things that you can say in the safe space of Camp Widow that you can't say aloud in other contexts. You can say that you don't miss everything about your person, but you can't say that to your mother-in-law or your father-in-law, of course.

So Camp Widow is that safe space where people can have those quiet conversations off to the side about how their relationship was complicated and the emotions that come with that. Like there could be guilt, there could be relief. I've heard so many times of people that were in the process of divorcing and finding out that somebody was sick and then deciding that they were going to stay till death do us part and honor that sort of marital commitment to their person. It can be really complicated. That kind of grief is something that Jessica Waite knows well. She's a writer who lives in Calgary. In 2015, her husband Sean died. He was

on a business trip when he had a heart attack. Here's where it gets complicated. After Sean died, Jessica found a whole lot out about who he was and the life that he'd been leading that was not only unexpected, but quite shocking. Jessica Waite writes about it in her memoir, A Widow's Guide to Dead Bastards. She's in our Calgary studio. Jessica, good morning. Good morning, Matt. Can you tell me, you write about this, it's a tricky question, but you do write about it and you've spoken about it. Tell me about the day that you found out that Sean had died. Yeah, that was November 4th, 2015. Sean had been away on a two-day business trip to Houston and he called me from the airport shuttle on his way from returning the rental car and said, see you in a few hours.

And then he never made it on the plane. He collapsed with a heart attack. And I got a call about an hour after Sean's and my last phone call from the ER charge nurse at the hospital that they had taken him to telling me that he had died. And it was so shocking to hear a disembodied voice on the telephone saying these words. And yeah, and so I happened to be about an hour outside of Calgary in Cochrane with my mom visiting one of her friends for lunch. And so we drove back and on the way home, I was able to have like just a little bit of time to

process how I was going to tell our son who was nine at the time, how was I going to tell the rest of the family and what were we going to do next? Telling your son, I mean, that's an unimaginably difficult thing to do. Yeah, yeah. And for all intents and purposes, you know, on the surface of his life, Sean was a really amazing, high-functioning, funny, charismatic, super successful person. And he was a really good dad. And our son, like, really, you know, loved him and couldn't wait for him to get home. So I had to decide if I was going to go to his school and get him or wait for him to come back on the bus. And I decided to give him just that extra little bit of time to have his dad still alive in his mind.

And still, even regardless of all the hard things that I found out since then, I think that's probably the hardest thing I'll ever have to do in my life to tell a child that his dad's not coming home. That's probably the hardest thing I'll ever have to do in my life to tell a child that his dad's not coming home. Part of that processing is also you trying to wrap your head around that word widow, right? That drive is the first time that you use that word. Yeah, yeah. I think I said to my mom, so what, like I'm a widow now? No, no, no, that's not right. I'm just a wife. not right. I'm just a wife. And I have learned subsequently in all the healing work that one of the things that differentiates people who are able to sort of, you know, come to terms and move

on is whether or not they're able to change into that new identity. You know, and not that you have to like embrace being a widow as your permanent identity, but to let go of the, like what was before, because that's changed all of a sudden. Can you tell me a little bit just about, I mean, the life that you had built with Sean, how you met and who you became together? Yeah, we met, actually, we were both teaching English in Japan after university and we became close friends. I noticed or I had a sense that he had a crush on me, but I wasn't that interested because I was about four and a half or five inches taller than he was. But you know, he had a real playful tenacity. He like was happy to be

friend zoned for a while. But then when I was about to leave Japan, he took a shot and asked me out. And I agreed to go out with him for the short term, just for the four months that we had left in Japan. But in that time, he really like proved himself to me as someone that I could depend on, someone who was very much a stand-up person. And I realized that expecting the man to be taller was a little bit sexist. And if I could get over that, then we could be together. And we built, you know, a really amazing life together. We had lots of adventure and it took us a while to conceive our son after we got married. And I stayed home to care for him after that. And Sean had gone back to do his MBA and then his career really took off. And so I

think, you know, when we started to move into some of those different, you know, more traditional roles of the woman at home and the man being the breadwinner, I think maybe some distance came in and that sort of thing. But in hindsight, there were signs that everything wasn't perfect in our relationship. I definitely knew something was wrong, but not what. But then after he died, like the day after his funeral, the box of his personal effects arrived in Calgary and I opened it up and began to find out that he was keeping a lot of secrets from me. There was infidelity, there was some drug abuse, compulsive spending and hidden debt.

And then he had been basically hoarding pornography since the advent of the internet. And so it was just sort of one shocking revelation after another. And I felt extremely betrayed. So I went from having the rug yanked out with grief to then having it yanked out with like an idea that my whole life had been a lie. And that like was anything that this person ever said like true this all starts i mean you get the box of of his personal effects that is shipped up from where he died in houston and that's traumatic and difficult in the best case scenario there's no best case scenario but when you get that box i mean it's one thing but then what did you find in the

box that showed you that there was something else beneath the surface? Well, the first thing was it kind of, I mean, it seems fairly minor. It was just a frequent bud buyer card for a cannabis shop in Colorado because this was before marijuana was legal in Canada, but it had been legalized in Colorado. And so I had asked him, have you tried legal weed? And he's like, no. And then I found out, like, why did he lie about that? It turned out that he'd had enough that he almost was up to you know like the bonus round yeah exactly it was like seven out

of ten stamps already there and and so it was just like that easy lob of a lie and me just catching it um and then starting to realize like why would he lie and if he lied about that what else is he lying about and then it's very weird, but I guess, I guess the password to his iPad. And then that's when, you know, I looked at his browser history and started to see like,

oh my gosh, like there are some really big horrifying, horrifying lies yet to discover. What popped up? You start typing in like a word into the search engine, the Houston hospital., I was trying to type in the Houston hospital. I was looking up the number for the Houston hospital so I could call the medical examiner in the morning. And the field self-populated with Houston escorts. And then I just tracked back the browser history to see what was he looking at.

I wasn't there. I don't know exactly what happened but um circumstantially it looks pretty much like someone else was his last visitor uh the night before he died and you know it's it's this is I had a heart this is one of my hardest things still to to talk about I don't usually like if I'm talking about the book I don't talk about this particular example because it's painful and it's something that's still, you know, humiliating to disclose. And Sean was somebody that I held in very high regard when he was alive and I did not want to damage his reputation. I didn't want to bring the pain of these revelations to any of our family or friends who loved him. How I see it now, although I did not at this moment,

a question of are you going to be complicit in the lie by carrying on the secret of this other person's shame? Initially, I didn't want to talk about it because I, you know, the shame was on me. But then also there would be that next layer if I told the wrong person where they would judge me, right? How could you not have known? Or like, why are you talking about this? Like, it's like, isn't he entitled to his privacy? Shouldn't his secrets be able to die with him? How did you wrap your head around that? Because it's, there's layers and layers and layers. There's what's on his browsing history. There's what he might've been doing the night before he died. There's this, what is it, a matrix of pornography that you find on this external

hard drive i mean yeah as you're grieving i mean i'll use the language from that that camp your person that's how we think about people as this is our person as you're grieving your person how do you wrap your head around all of the other things that happen to be going on in that person's life that you didn't know about that yeah no so so the first first thing was, of course, I was livid, like just like anyone. I think that's like the predominant emotion for most people when they've found out they've been betrayed. I was like super angry. You made a playlist

around that, right? Like F-U-S-W playlist? Yeah. Yeah, I made a playlist that was F-U meaning F-U, S-W being his initials. And so that's sort of actually what I kind of turned to before I could really start to confide in people was this music.

I had just really powerful songs that were full of the revengeful, rageful, and then also a little bit hopeful and some sad songs. And so the music would just sort of guide me through the plethora of emotions because it wasn't socially appropriate to be as angry as I was. Right. And what do you mean?

Well, like, because I felt like people expected me to be sad because they didn't know that I uncovered all these secrets. And so when people would drop by with a lasagna and come in, you know, they'd hold my hand and say, you know, you and your son were everything to Sean. And I'd be like, if you only knew. So I would be angry, but I felt like I had to hide that and just sort of fake my way through some performance of sadness. Even though I also was sad, like that sadness didn't go away. It just wasn't, you know, the front of mind thing. I also was sad. That sadness didn't go away. It just wasn't the front of mind thing.

But I realized over time that in a lot of ways, the secrets that Sean was keeping, they were so big that his primary relationship in some primary relationship to keeping the secret instead of allowing myself to receive the comfort and the compassion of these people who, you know, they'd driven in traffic. They'd made a lasagna. They came all this way to be with me and I was shutting them out. I realized that keeping the secret was hurting me and that probably hurts a lot of people. You know, in Canada, we're working culturally on truth and reconciliation. You know, in Canada, we're working culturally on truth and reconciliation. And I do think that the truth comes first. And we can't do anything toward, you know, a healing relationship until we can be honest about what's happening. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs.

We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. We heard a little bit earlier from people who had gone to this camp widow,

which you have gone to as well. Yes. You write about it. And one of the, the, the, the clips that we heard said that somebody went and they thought it was going to be like kind of like a hippie hugging circle. And you thought that it was going to be what people dressed in black, black veiled women sobbing Kumbaya around a campfire. Yeah. What were you worried about?

Yeah, well, the same thing. I really, I loved that clip because I felt simpatico with that guy. It's like, is this a hippie hugging cult? Is this, like, what is this going to be? And, yeah, I was afraid of those things, that it was just going to be weird. And I was also afraid because in my mind, everybody else had a perfect marriage. Everybody else was like super in love with their person, their perfect person. And I would be the only one who kind of thought he was an asshole in that

moment and was like mad at him and had found out all these secrets. And that was one of my big discoveries was, you know, like Jodi said, Jodi Skeet said at the intro, like there's things that everyone doesn't miss about the person that they love. And so just allowing human imperfection, the ways that we all kind of try and fail in life, that was like a huge part of Camp Guido for me. Tell me what else you learned in talking with other people. One of the things that is so isolating about grief, and partially because we don't talk about it, is that people feel like what they're going through, despite the fact that is the thing that we'll all go through,

is unique to them. When you were able to speak with other people who were living through what you were living through, what did you learn? One of the things that I want to say about that is like, it's so isolating and it feels so unique, partly because it is unique, right? Like I'm the only me who lost the only Sean that there ever will be in this whole world. And so there's a truth to the fact that it is unique and personal and specific. But over time, after you have like sort of felt and processed that, if you can let it go into the universal experience and start to realize, because you know in your head that it's universal, but when you're amongst people, every single one of whom has gone through some version of this, you know it in a different way. And so I felt so much less

alone. And I also started to really understand that just because the person dies doesn't mean the relationship dies you know like there's still all the love that you used to have there's still all the memories all the all the ways that this person still shows up in your life um as a presence or as an absence um and so that idea of being able to shift the relationship into the form that it is now, that was really pivotal. Is that something that you have to lean into or is it something that you have to be involved in or something that happens to you that you just have to receive? I think the more we can participate, and by participate, all I really mean is paying attention. Just paying attention to what's happening is all you kind of have to do.

paying attention, just paying attention to what's happening is all you kind of have to do. Because what I knew for myself was that I didn't want to end up lonely, bitter, resentful. And that's what I felt like I had sort of the ingredients to make a life of bitterness and loneliness and mistrust. And I knew I didn't want that. And then what I found was kind of like letting, like starting to understand and take it less personally because, you know, everything that Sean was doing, lots of people do, right? And I found out like that this is so much more prevalent than I wish it was. And so there are people who are alive and struggling to numb out to, I don't know, escape, like all these kinds of things. And it's just part of being human. who are alive and struggling to numb out, to, I don't know, escape, like all these kinds of things. And it's just part of being human.

As you're working your way through this, one of the things that happens is that there are things you start to notice that might be signs from him or something. What's going on there? Yeah. Okay. So this is another part that's a little bit hard to talk about culturally because what was happening was that things that didn't used to happen around my home or in my life and stereo were turning on by themselves. All the light bulbs, not all, but like 34 light bulbs in my house burned out in the same week. There was a situation where I'd be in the library and kind of like my field of vision was blurred, but I could only see one book. And then that book bore an uncanny resemblance to what I was going through. And that happened more than one time. And I was a fairly and I still continue to be a fairly skeptical person. And I really, you know, appreciate and value science. But I was treating each data point as its own thing. And when I started to look at the things in aggregate, it did seem like something that I needed to pay attention to and maybe open up my

worldview to shift a little bit from what it had been before. And what I've learned subsequently is that these things aren't rare. And even at Camp Widow, there was a session called Signs and Synchronicities where people started to share strange things that were happening for them. And so, yeah, this is definitely not a book that's aiming to persuade anyone to believe anything specific about what happens when we die. But it did, my experience forced me to look in new directions. And I think that ultimately those were helpful to my healing as well. So what do you believe about that? What I believe now is, like I said earlier, I think relationships aren't over when we die um and

whether or not that just means that you're like through dreams or memories or that sort of thing you're still continuing your relationship but I I don't I think I was sort of agnostic so I thought maybe there's nothing um maybe there's like have heaven hell heaven hell paradigm wasn't really like super down with reincarnation. Like all of those things are maybe possible, but there's just more possibility. I think there's just more possibility than I used to hold. And so I'm just, I'm all about paying attention now and just noticing what happens. And then, and noticing that at all times we're deciding what to believe about things. And so, like, are you going to believe the thing that, like, makes you feel the most frustrated, the most angry, that keeps you in a loop of outrage?

You can believe that if you want to. But if there's some other way that leads you in a better direction, like I've found, like, that's useful. I mean, these are big, kind of wild, hairy questions. It's just, to me, there's, to me, there are physical things that you do. You get a friend to come by and you clean the mechanical room in your house, which is kind of like we're getting rid of something. Yes. When you go through that, that's different than the more metaphysical kind of processes that you're kind of working through, right?

Well, it's interesting, too, though, because I think it's connected in a way. Like that friend came to help me because I had a bunch of Sean's belongings plus my belongings in the basement, but there were multiple computers and external hard drives full of pornography that were still being stored down there. And I couldn't take them in

to have their hard drives wiped off because I was too ashamed. And I just left them there. And when we cleaned them out, like my friend took them for me on my behalf and it wasn't shameful or difficult for her. But when I handed them to her, it was like I was handing over all the shame that I was carrying. over all of the shame that I was carrying. And so it's a physical object, but it also has like a metaphysical connection because it helped me release something.

And it felt like, you know, when all was said and done with cleaning those rooms out, it felt like it was healing and freeing for Sean too. And for your son as well. Yes, and for my son. My son said, after the rooms were cleaned out, he said, I feel like I had an ache that I didn't know I had, and now it's gone. And so it's just, you know, like, whatever it is that we're trying to, like, keep a lid on or hide, it's still affecting us in so many ways.

And so this is where, like, coming to the truth again, like the truth is that these things were there and we were living with them and it was having an effect. What have you learned about the function of grief in a place, in a society where we go out of our way to not talk about death? How I hold it now is that I believe that grief serves an evolutionary function in human development that helps us, again, go from being individualistic to realizing that we're part of a group, that we're part of something bigger than ourselves. and I think that yeah there's a lot of ways that we culturally

try to deny grief we try to you know don't give a long enough bereavement leave we don't allow people like a long enough time in the process and we don't culturally support what needs to happen and so I think yeah we're kind of doing we're kind of treating grief like it's the pornography

filled computers in the basement in some ways just leave them down there. Leave them down there, ignore them, you know, carry on, move on, move forward. And yeah, and to our detriment and peril, I think that we find that what's behind it, if we can stay with the feelings long enough, the discomfort of it is the love. with the feelings long enough, the discomfort of it, is the love. It's the love that we had for this person coming back in full force. And who doesn't want to feel love and vitality again, right? How do you think about him now?

He died in 2015. That's almost 10 years. Yeah, yeah. We just had the ninth anniversary of his passing a couple of weeks ago. I can remember Sean fondly now for the parts of him that I loved and admired. I don't feel triggered by the things that used to be upsetting for me. And so, yeah, I feel like we're on good terms. I think I say in the book, if we meet sometime in the afterlife, I won't punch you in the face, which wasn't always guaranteed.

But yeah, now I feel a sense of peace. What about for you? I mean, how are you? You've gone through something and you're going through it now in this public way, which is probably strange in and of its own right. But how are you different now than you were in 2015? I think that I've learned a lot about what's important, being with people who are grieving and being with people who are dying or just going through anything,

that all you have to do is be there. You don't have to fix anything. Nothing's a problem. And so I think I'm a lot more patient and a lot more compassionate and a lot slower to judge and slower to try to act and fix other people's problems, which all of which I think help in relationship. Yeah. And I'm less afraid of death, which helps me make better decisions in life, I think.

So just side note, can I ask you about that? Like you're less afraid of death. What does that mean? So just side note, can I ask you about that? Like you're less afraid of death. What does that mean? I guess my belief system has shifted enough that I feel like whatever happens. So there's some kind of animating force that's holding my body together. And when that leaves, I think it's going somewhere. I think it's going to be met by others who I have loved in this lifetime or, and I, and so I feel like I'm not afraid of what will happen to my spirit when it leaves my body. And I'm not afraid of my body going back to the earth where, you know, life will continue on. Because I'm not afraid of that, then it just makes me, it makes me more joyful. It makes, The people who I know who work in hospice,

who are around the dying, it's a life-affirming space and they don't take things for granted and they're not as judgmental and grudge-holding. It's a good way to live, to have the awareness of death riding on your shoulder because it just makes you take less for granted. I'm really glad to have had the chance to talk to you. I mean, it's a remarkable book, but you being willing to talk about it and talking about it in the ways that you have over the course of the conversation is really quite something. Thank you very much. Oh, thanks, Matt. It's been a joy. Jessica Waite's memoir is called A Widow's Guide to Dead Bastards. She lives in Calgary.

If you are somebody who is widowed, we would love to, I get this is a very personal question, but given what she has talked about, it would be really interesting to hear your own experience and your own story. How did you cope? What did you learn about grief and about yourself? She talks about the purpose of grief in some ways and the meaning of grief and how she's different. How did that experience change you in terms of who you are now? Email us. The email address is thecurrentatcbc.ca. Again, thecurrentatcbc.ca. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.