How can I view contacts that were on my now destroyed device
Your only means of accessing your list of contacts is through your google account (which is how I assume you tried to do so with your wife's phone). However, this is dependent on when you last synced your contacts with your google account on your phone before it was destroyed. So, it's possible that you didn't make a recent sync back when it was still working. You can double-check your gmail account and look at your list of contacts there.