Jessica Waite (Phil Crozier)

We often turn to guides when things get out of hand or messy and we need something to lead us back to order. A guidebook can offer solutions for regaining control – a guide to grief might be salutary if it offers steps out of hopelessness. In that sense, the catchy and admittedly fun title of Jessica Waite’s debut memoir, The Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards, is a bit of a misnomer. This memoir, about the author’s grief after the death of her husband, doesn’t offer prescriptions, or even categorizations; rather, it documents fallible humanity, but also extends grace to it. In many ways, The Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards is an anti-guide – it is the exploration of a life within a miasma of emotions, life without guideposts and flowing with disorder.

The memoir starts with the fateful day in 2015 when Waite receives news that her husband, Sean, is dead after suffering a heart attack at a Houston airport, on his way home to Calgary from one of his frequent business trips. In going through Sean’s belongings after his death, Waite discovers debts, a secret and extensive cache of pornography, evidence of affairs, and a history of hiring sex workers and escorts. The memoir follows Waite’s attempts to align Sean’s secret life with her understanding of him, all as she reckons with her feelings of betrayal, continued love and longing, extreme grief, and the necessity of being a single parent to her young son.

Crucially, The Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards is not a book about Sean Waite, though Jessica does consider what lay behind some of his behaviour during their marriage, which she reveals wasn’t without its bumps and difficulties over the years. As we learn Sean’s secrets along with Waite – the events after Sean’s death are written in the present tense, while her memories of him are related in the past tense – we get a view of Waite’s psyche as she absorbs and reacts to each new discovery and bit of information.

Waite is generous, vulnerable, self-aware, fallible – an effective storyteller and humorous memoirist. The reader might be surprised to find their attitude toward Sean change just as often as Waite’s does. At times, Waite is deeply angered by Sean, by his obfuscations and manipulations. At other times, when love topples her, she makes room for his transgressions and mistakes.

Waite writes honestly about her varied feelings – sweet love, fiery anger, dizziness, hunger, loneliness, vengeance – in the aftermath, which spans years, effectively depicting the multifarious and endless nature of grief, its ability to morph and run through the mind and body, sometimes covering the same ground again and again.

Western psychology works to solve and cure, and Waite, who studied psychology in school, is driven for quite some time to find answers. The more she tries to understand her grief and get a handle on it – she attends seminars and programs, community-based healing groups, sees counsellors and spiritual guides – the more she finds that it can’t be cured. At a camp-like program for widows, Waite comes across women who have been widowed for more than a decade and still experience modes of grief. Instead of finding a solution, what Waite finds is community, which helps to sap loneliness of its destabilizing force. Waite pursues a responsible and respectful inquiry into Indigenous practices that provide closure and healing for grief, but she does not tout this approach as a prescription – it’s just what she chooses to try.

Waite makes space for the flow of being as grief settles in. She is not condemnatory, nor self-flagellating, and she doesn’t hope to bracket her grief within a certain point in her life, or within the book itself. There is self-acceptance: for the tears, the self-corrections, for anger and nasty impulses. There is no right way out of grief; there’s no right way to feel about a beloved dead bastard. But Waite’s memoir helpfully illustrates that patience for the self, in all its unruly presentations – in the dis-order itself –  is sometimes all that is manageable. The key to surviving grief isn’t controlling it, but letting it happen.

Although the book ends with a kind of closure for Waite, it also ends on a note of openness, expressed in a poem given to Waite by a friend: she can remember Sean in anything, “a stone, a leaf, / a hand, a heart.” The Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards bears testament to the fact that coming to terms with grief isn’t about forgetting: it’s a continual act, and integral to living itself.