I had read and been told countless times that mourning over a failed marriage, especially one cut in half with the Sword of Infidelity (TM), was very much like mourning over a deceased loved one, or at least a deceased spouse (I can't even begin to compare this feeling to what it must be like to lose a child). I got my first taste of that comparison, about a month after DDay, when a second cousin died after a very long and painful battle with some very terrible illnesses. My grandparents were so distraught. They described what her husband was going through, and his actions, and it was all too familiar. I wished very much at the time that I was close to that side of the family so I could offer an understanding ear for him to vent to. Nobody knows what to say when you go through this or that kind of loss unless they've lived it themselves. Otherwise, they do their best to offer kind words but it can feel empty sometimes, and that's not their fault. They can't tell you how to actually cope with it. They can't fully empathize with these unique circumstances. They just don't know.
Something that I've felt and that I've heard from others is how if your spouse dies, you receive a lot more support than if your spouse simply cheats on you and skips town. At least, you receive support for longer. In our situation, at some point people expect you to just move on. Imagine telling someone who's husband or wife died they should "move on already". That statement made to the bereaved is clearly callous to anyone with half a brain, but people will feel comfortable saying it to the betrayed. Again, it's not their fault, because they just don't know. To them, lots of people get divorced, and hey, you can always get remarried, right? Find someone "better".
To me, it feels very much like my ex-wife died. She very quickly removed herself from my life after her affair was revealed. She never spoke to me again after we handled our assets. Maybe I had 6 weeks to process things whereas a bereaved spouse usually has to process it immediately, but for all intents and purposes, my marriage was over on DDay. My spouse died 6 weeks later. The difference is, when your spouse dies, there usually isn't someone preventing you from healing by standing in your way and attempting to take your money, or take your kids away, or make your life even more difficult than it already is. And when they cheat and leave, they're still out in the world. If you're a bereaved spouse, you put everything to rest right then and there and you try to move on. If you're betrayed, you might have to see them every time you pick up and drop off your kids, or if abandoned, you could one day run into them and reopen all of those old wounds or even create whole new wounds when you see how happy they are with the AP, or how they have kids with them now, or any number of triggers. For a BS, the effects aren't mostly over, no, they're now something that you have to deal with on a regular basis for a very long time.
To be clear, I feel that these are apples and oranges situations and they both suck tremendously, but there are so many overlaps that anyone who hasn't gone through one or both wouldn't understand.
