How A Writer Repaired Her Marriage After Her Husband Died
Jessica Waite and her husband Sean shared a love of Harry Potter. On November 16, 2001 it was Sean’s birthday. It was also the opening night of the first Harry Potter movie. So Jessica stood in line to get tickets to the midnight showing of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
They got home from the movie at 3 a.m. and walked their dog.
JESSICA: So we were walking down along the river where we live and it was not quite pitch black cuz there's some streetlights and stuff that's still in the city. But something went over our heads and I'm like, what was that? And it was an owl and then we're like, whoa, an owl. And then it swooped us again. And again three, each times this owl swooped over us and, and I said, oh, we should teach it to send messages like Harry Potter. And Sean said, ‘owls are messengers for the dead.’
Sean’s mother was a BlackFoot elder and she had taken him to ceremonies and taught him about his culture.
JESSICA: So we ended up having quite a deep conversation …talking about… What, what do you really really believe happens when you die? Um, and we went, oh, all of the sort of options about reincarnation and eternal nothingness and having an now. And we ended up making a deal that if there was something after death that we, whoever died first would come back on their birthday to prove it to the other person… So we shook on it and <laugh>, you know, that was our deal.
Little did Jessica know that Sean planned to make good on his promise.
This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.
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Sean and Jessica met in Japan where they both taught English. Sean was 26. Jessica was 22.
JESSICA: I knew he had a crush me, but I was not that interested in dating him because I was five inches taller than him. And he <laugh>, he, he was so fun to hang out with and just to join super smart and engaging. Um, and I really liked him, but I wasn't romantically interested.
So Jessica gave off those signals and Sean waited to ask her out until the final weeks of their program. It was around that time that Jessica found out her grandmother died. She wanted to fly back for the funeral.
JESSICA: My credit card wasn't working. And so Sean actually paid for my ticket he's like, he's like just get on the train and get to the airport. And when you get there, there'll be a ticket waiting for you.
It was on that flight home that Jessica realized she didn’t want to let Sean go, someone who’d go to such great lengths for her. The next three years were a blur. They moved in together back in Calgary where they were from, talked about the future, met each other’s families… and by 1998 they were married. And for a while, life felt kind of perfect. When they eventually had their son, Sean doted on him. Here he is talking to him on his first Christmas in a home video…
SEAN: Audio from home video
Not all was well. Sean had drastic mood swings. One moment he was decorating the house for his son’s birthday and the life of the party, the next he exploded in rage over something insignificant.
JESSICA: His mom had passed away just a while before that our house that was supposed to have been renovated while we were in Singapore, wasn't done. And we were living in the construction. And so there was just all of these factors sort of playing into Sean's stress level and he was not doing well. And I could see that he was haggard looking and exhausted. His fuse was incredibly short. He could cry at almost anything. And he told me that he had deleted all of our family photos off his phone, because just seeing our faces made him start crying. And so, so I could see the toll it was taking, and I was really, really worried about him and, um, waiting for an opportunity to come in and have a heart to heart conversation to say, something's got to give.
They were driving from Calgary to Denver, a 17 hour drive to explore a move to Denver for Sean’s work with a tech company. They had stopped in Helena, Montana (HELL-eh-nuh) for the night and were getting back on the road.
JESSICA: Fifteen minutes into the car ride, his mood changed. And if there had to been cream in his coffee, it would've gone sour from how bad the mood was. Um, and he wasn't eating and he hadn't slept in a couple days…We made a wrong turn and got onto the wrong road. And, um, I was like, let's just pull over. And of course, correct. And he didn't pull over and then I'm like pull over. And anyway, so he cranked the wheel and went up over the curb and our dogs were in the back and they were tumbling over each other and yapping and yapping, and I'm like, you're gonna kill the dogs. And he said, I'm gonna, I kill you. It was terrifying for our son and for me, because the anger and the kind of hatred in those words, he did mean that. And then I turned to like confront him and he was gone. He had left and thrown the keys away and run up the street. PAUSE
It was at that moment that Jessica thought Sean needed professional help with his mental health. She had seen bipolar disorder on both sides of their family. But when things were good, they were really good and it was easy to forget the bad moments. Like that Halloween of 2015 Sean went as Harry Potter and their now nine-year-old son chose to be the dread pirate Roberts from the movie, The Princess Bride.
JESSICA: So he had a mask in the high boots and of this whole black pirate costume. Uh, and so Sean, Sean had the Harry Potter glasses. And so he dressed up as Harry Potter and they had a duel in the backyard running around with the sword and the wand and, and it was a beautiful moment and I took some photos of it.
Two days later Sean flew to Houston on a business trip.
JESSICA: On the way home from that, um, he called me from the airport shuttle to say, see you in a few hours.
Jessica was out to lunch with her mom when she got a phone call from a charge nurse at a Houston hospital.
JESSICA: And she said, are you alone right now? And I said, no, I'm with my mom … and she said, do you have a pen because you're gonna need to write some things down. And she said, uh, your husband's Sean Waite, he has died. <laugh> And so I didn't believe her. Um, and I thought, no, you must have the wrong person. Like how can and, and he was perfectly healthy and he had just had a physical and had a clean bill of health. And um, but yeah, she just said, here's the case number, please call the medical examiner.
Sean never got on the plane. He had a heart attack at the airport and they weren’t able to revive him. Turns out he had an autoimmune condition called cardiac sarcoidosis (sar-coy-DOH-suhs), which is difficult to detect in a regular physical. Jessica isn’t sure whether Sean’s mental illness caused his body to turn on itself.
Their son was at school in the fourth grade.
JESSICA: My mom drove me home. Thank goodness that she was there. Um, and so it, in that time of driving back, I had to decide whether I was gonna go to my son's school and pick him up… and we talked it over and decided not to do that because if he came home on the school bus, then he had a few more hours of his dad being alive.
So when he got home Jessica decided to take him for a drive.
JESSICA: I just sort of followed an impulse to take him out somewhere that we never go so that we could, after I gave him the news come back home and that I didn't have to like, so, so that some part of the, you know, someone else's neighborhood could sort of absorb the shock of the news and then we could come home at home. Could still be a safe place for him. And so
LAUREL: Refuge.
JESSICA: Yeah, when I told him, obviously, you know, it was so awful and he let out a primal scream of pain and ran away from me and I was starting then to like, why did I come? Like, what are the neighbors? Are they gonna call the cops? … So then we came home and, and my mom was there and he asked if we could just sit at the table and color in his secret garden coloring book. And so that's what we all did until, until the family started arriving at the house.
On the day of Sean’s funeral a box arrived in the mail. Jessica was about to give the eulogy so pushed it to the back of her closet until the next day.
JESSICA: I opened it up and it it's, you know, the clothes that Sean was wearing in his computer bag and his wallet. Um, and, and so I would open that stuff kind of slowly, but in his wallet, there was, um, a card, um, that kind of caught me off guard. It was a frequent bud buyer card from a 4-20 cannabis store, um, in Denver, Colorado.
That struck Jessica as strange. Pot was legal in Colorado but not yet in Canada, where they were living.
JESSICA: He wasn't to my knowledge, a habitual pot smoker, but I had asked him, have you tried legal pot? And he was like, no, I, and so I remembered him saying no, and then that didn't match with what I was seeing.
She says he was only in Colorado for a short period and it looked like a lot of pot had been smoked in a short amount of time.
JESSICA: I started to feel quite nervous about <laugh> like, what that meant for, um, like why did he lie?
It was the first in a long, long list of secrets that slowly came to light after his death. Jessica found out Sean had spent all of their money. Her mom went with her to the bank and backed her for a loan to pay for the funeral and the next few months expenses. And he’d kept a complicated database of pornography. After a couple attempts she figured out his password and logged into his ipad, where she discovered the key to a collection of pornography so extensive it had to be stored on multiple hard drives. At first as she looked through some of the videos, she was curious, what was Sean into? Then she felt humiliated and ashamed. Why hadn’t she known this side of her husband? So she locked the hard drives away in the basement.
JESSICA: I felt so betrayed but at the same time there was a history of mental illness in Sean's family, and his mom had been hospitalized multiple times with bipolar disorder. And Sean had been through some bouts of, um, mental health struggles. And I have bipolar disorder in my own family lineage as well. And so I recognized some of the things, …so all of the <laugh> like revelations that he was not managing well, um, and was fully symptomatic, started landing on my doorstep.
In the following days Jessica invited a friend who is a financial planner over to the house to help her sort through all of the receipts and spending.
JESSICA: There were these like really exorbitant hotel bills that seemed like much too high for the number of nights stayed. And so I had an itemized receipt sent and I saw, you know, breakfast for two like that, that kind of thing.
Another devastating blow…
Sean and another woman had been having an affair.
JESSICA: I was livid <laugh> obviously and, and, and, and humiliated. Um, and she was angry with me and I could also see that she felt incredibly sorry for me. And I was, felt like this object of pity, which was a terrible feeling. Um, <affirmative> but a whole bunch of things tumbled into place. <laugh> like once I had, you know, that confirmation.
LAUREL: Like puzzle pieces were falling into place.
JESSICA: Puzzle pieces, falling into place and things times when my intuition had been screaming at me that something was wrong, but I didn't know what I'm like, oh, it was that.
Jessica started to feel crazy and gaslit. By this point she and Sean had been together for 20 years.
JESSICA: You have to be pretty crafty to hide something like that. And, and you have to lie a lot and like, are you just a liar? And is everything you ever told me a lie? And that's what it felt like... everything you ever said was a lie. You never loved me. Nothing about our life is true. Every memory that I have is tainted and yeah. I'm sorry that I ever met you.
But Sean wasn’t there to confront.
JESSICA: I was raging at him, but it was just like yelling at the air and say, taking off my wedding ring and saying we’re divorced and throwing the, you know.
Jessica didn’t feel like she could tell anyone about Sean’s secrets.
JESSICA: …because Sean was beloved by almost everyone who knew him and I didn't want to tarnish his reputation... I wanted to be able to keep those memories alive, especially for our son, that he, our son's memories alive of his wonderful, fun, loving dad, um, who he adored and who adored him.
That Christmas eve her son had spent the night at his cousin’s house so Jessica woke up on Christmas morning bereft and alone. Sean loved Christmas so much it felt meaningless without him. She looked out the window and the trees were covered in frost.
JESSICA: It's freezing cold and Sean's sister and her husband had invited me to go for a walk. And so I met them and we walked on this path that we used to that Sean and I used to walk every Christmas morning cuz it was close to his parents' house.
In the days that followed Jessica tried to go about her daily routine. One day when she was changing the sheets on her son’s bed, she found the metal tag that came with Sean’s ashes. Jessica had kept the ashes in a screwed tight urn hidden in a roll top desk in the garage.
JESSICA: I was making the bed and it's a platform bed, and I had to slide it out and something came rolling out a coin. And I reached in and I looked at the coin and it was the dog tag from Sean's cremated remains. And I was like, oh no, our son has been snooping around in the garage.
She was worried he might come across the weed Sean possibly stashed in there. The metal tag that was screwed inside the urn that contained Sean’s ashes had rolled out from under the bed beneath a dry erase board where their son had written, “I miss you, Dad.”
JESSICA: And so I'm like, where did you get this? And he said, what is it? And I'm like, look, I know it looks like a treasure coin or something, but it's not that he's like, can I see it? And he, I handed it to him and he looked at it and he like genuinely from his reaction had not seen it before. And so then I had this question of like, how did it get there? And so I was mad at the dog tag. Like, are you trying to haunt us, like get out of here, like leave us alone.
Jessica said this sort of sign was contrary to anything she believed. But as much as she tried, she couldn’t ignore it.
JESSICA: Books were kind of like jumping out at me in the library… I almost fainted in the library stack and my head was all woozy and I crouched down and tried to like come out of that feeling. And when I looked up, I could only see one thing clearly. And it was a little green heart on the spine of a book. Um, and when I took the book home, the plot of it overlaid with what I was going through. Like, it was about wife who had been betrayed and her husband died kind of, of remorse. And it was like, and I was like, and he, and the husband, everything that he wanted were things that my husband already had, like the brand of car, like, it was just these details and it just felt uncanny.
PAUSE
These things started to feel like signs, signs that Sean was wanting to like to communicate with me and to maybe apology, it felt like an apology. Like when I, when, when she got the apology, it felt like an apology when the husband died of remorse, it felt like, you know, part of Sean's autoimmune, you know, disorder was like this cognitive dissonance that he was living in a way that he didn't want to live and that he wasn't being the man that he wanted to be for his family. So even though, even though they seem to me now, like kind of obvious, I wasn't ready to receive any of it. So I was just dismissed, dismissed, dismiss, swipe left, you know, <laugh>
She decided she needed to talk to someone. But one grief counselor wasn’t enough.
JESSICA: One, I talked to only about grief and one like sadness and one, I talked about everything else …they don't give you gold stars at counseling, but I wanted to feel like if they did, I would get one. Um, and that, so I was trying to like achieve at grieving and, and you know, and I was, um, and, and so that, um, came to an end, like I realized I'm not gonna be able to have to stop now because I'm gaming it a little bit. And, and then it was only when I went to see, um, someone who is, she's a death doula and a ritual healing practitioner that I was able to, um, bring both of those pieces together and she was able to hold it for me. And she drew a kind of map for me about grief as like an initiation. Um, and I could place myself on this map and see, oh, okay. <laugh> I, I know where I am now.
Death doula Sarah Kerr says she often works with people who may not belong to a religious group but who believe something else exists beyond death. It’s her job to walk with them through that process. Part of that is often helping the living heal unresolved issues with those who have died.
SARAH: When I think about how I work with people I often imagine it like a map, the old medieval maps that had an edge and there be dragons on the other side there was an edge and there the map stopped. Now we have maps that continue we have a bigger picture. We have an expanded understanding of what there is. And I feel like in dominant western culture the map of what happens around death and loss is pretty limited. We say when the heart and breathing stops life stops that's the end of existence and there’s no opportunity for further communication. That seems like a pretty limited map because the number of people who do have ongoing communication is enormous. Something is happening there and so I offer a bigger map. Once we start to track and pay attention to thing we learn.
Sarah helped Jessica clear out her anger to make room for curiosity.
So one day Jessica was picking cherries from a tree Sean had planted in their front yard. She planned to make jam with them.
JESSICA: I had put on an upbeat music. It was the, it was the soundtrack from the Entourage HBO series. And so it's like some that kinda hip hop, groove music. And, and there's a song that was playing, um, called weekend, jump off by Kevin, Michael, and, and it's about a guy who, uh, is going out. He goes, goes out every weekend to cheat on his girlfriend. And so there's this line and is like, how can I do it and not get caught? And I'm like, and my ears perked up. … And he is like, and then he goes back to his baby and says, he's sorry. And I'm like, I'm getting super mad listening to it. And I'm just feeling this rage come up and I'm crushing the cherries and juices dripping down my arm. And so, and, and then I'm just suddenly livid and I'm like, live it at like, like at Sean forever, cheating on me 1:42:10 Then a song starts playing that. I kind of recognize, but it's not from entourage soundtrack and it's a song, um, called I will follow you into the dark by death cab for cutie. And it's about like eternal love across the veil of death. And I'd heard it before a long time before and, and played it for Sean and said like, this is how like, like this is how I think of us, you know? And so then I'm listening super carefully and I'm crying because it's such a sudden change. And like, and, and my aim is starting to melt away. Um, and I'm just listening so carefully and there's a line in that song that says you and me have seen everything to see from Bangkok to Calgary. And I started to think about like, what does it mean that I will follow you into the dark? Like the obvious thing is like, when I die, we'll be together. But, but also that my thoughts were becoming so dark in that when I was still I'm still angry, right. I'm still triggered by this like rage when I feel and like to imagine that wherever Sean is now that he has so much compassion and tenderness, that he'll follow me into the darkness of my own thoughts and that I don't have to be alone anymore. Like me facing the consequences of his actions by myself, you know, it's so, so that felt like such a tender place of like forgiveness and a kind of communion.
Sarah had encouraged Jessica to acknowledge the signs so she pulled a bottle of gin out of the freezer and she poured a couple glugs into the jam and she looked up at the ceiling and said, ok, I got your message. Gin is what brought the two of them together. The night he asked Jessica out he heard her singing “Cold Gin” by KISS. It’s one of their more obscure tracks, and Sean said to himself, “I don’t know any girls who know that song. I better not let this one go.” The lyrics go: “it’s cold gin time and again. You know it’s the only thing that keeps us together.”
SARAH: If the lights go on or this song comes on you get goosebumps and it just brings you to tears for no logical reason believe it and go with it and see what happens when you go with it…when I acknowledged and accepted and I received that in the same awareness or map of reality it deepens so giving people the language to have a conversation helps support that conversation to continue to grow. ... a call and response we speak back in ritual gestures in symbolic actions and a ritual is an action that means something…that’s how we communicate back and forth with the other realm through ritual you can imagine a poet capturing that moment.
At this point Jessica had been avoiding dealing with Sean’s massive database of pornography. It sat collecting dust in a dark spare room in the basement she’d been ignoring along with some of Sean’s other things. So she called a friend to help her declutter.
JESSICA: She came and it took us three days to go through all of this stuff, but we cleared it out and she took the computers away from me. Um, and when I handed them over to her. There was just a moment of something that transferred between us, where it was like, I was handing over my own shame, Sean's shame and she could just receive it. And it wasn't even heavy for her. And she said, clutter is frozen fear. And I looked at, at all of these things as frozen fear, I could feel how afraid Sean was
… the way that Sean had cataloged and organized the pornography, wasn't different from how he stored, you know, all these home improvement supplies and all like, and, and everything was just sort of in its category. And it kind of took the morality piece out.
Jessica says it felt like a weight had been lifted, and not just off of her.
JESSICA: When our son came home from and saw the cleared out space, he said, I feel like I had an ache that I didn't know I had, and now it's gone.
PAUSE
Jessica discovered once she cleared the anger out of the way she could become more receptive to Sean’s signs.
JESSICA: And then I was able to start to wonder, is that Sean like, is, is sh is this Sean? And if it is wow, he really must be sorry. … I started to wonder, like, is that optimal? Like, like, is there, is it optimal that, that there's still hanging around so close or is there so something even beyond that they're supposed to go to. Um, and I, there's not supposed to, but, but, but I started to wonder about that. And, and so then I, I, for myself, how to become really clear, like I've got life on earth and I will raise our son the best that I can, and you go do your spirit thing, whatever, like whatever is the best for you go and do it. And so that I could really like with love, let Sean go.
It was around this time that one of Sean’s brothers was celebrating a milestone birthday and invited Jessica.
JESSICA: He gave a speech and in the speech, he shared the story of how he met his wife in this really, it was in a snowball fight at their old university campus. And, and you could just feel the flush on their cheeks and how they were prod to fall in love.
It was in that moment that Jessica realized she had stories inside her about Sean she longed to tell.
JESSICA: I don't know that anyone would've asked me to share my love story with Sean, because he wasn't there and everybody missed him and nobody wanted to like make me sad or kill the vibe of the party. And if it was true that they wouldn't ask me, they're the people who would be most keen to ever hear it. And so if they wouldn't ask me, then no one would ever ask me a again. And so that, that kind of crystallized for me that my love story was still important to me and that probably other people who have lost someone and wanna speak about them, but don't get asked cuz of that social awkwardness, um, like what a, what a terrible kind of silencing and loneliness that creates.
So she went online to see if there was a kind of sharing space for stories for people who have died, and there wasn’t. So she started one. It’s called endless stories dot love.
JESSICA: Reading other people's stories, we're able to kind of see themselves and some wrote and said, when my dad died, I couldn't cry. But when I read the story here, it allowed me to cry for my dad.
Today Jessica is dating someone new. They’ve been together for five years now and he jokes that he’s in the Bermuda love triangle with Jessica and Sean.
She has a different view of death now and what happens after we die.
JESSICA: What my own experience has told me is that it's not over. It's not nothing. Um, so what I think is we have an animating force, I call it a soul that leaves our physical body and goes somewhere and continue used to evolve and develop. And that there's an ecosystem between the living and the dead. And there's things that we as living beings can do to facilitate that and things that they can do to facilitate relationship with us or help us….1:18:15 I used to think you of got to get together with the people who you loved, but I don't wanna go around heaven like this, like with a blinder on like, trying, like in case Sean’s over there and not being able to be happy to see him, um, in the afterlife, if that's an option. Um, and so now when I die, if he's there to meet me, I will be really happy and have my arms open.
This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.
