Cadet - I found your welcome thread, but only through a google search. Perhaps there is an easier place to post it.
Regarding anger, I'm still bouncing between not caring at all, feeling guilty about things that I did that could have kept our marriage together to anger at what my wife has dumped on me and the pain and damage she's given to my kids, the extra workload, and that she'll be getting money and not working while I work twice as hard. The anger is at its worst when I'm feeling time pressured, so I have to both work on my reaction to time pressure and figure out how to manage the additional workload. It will still take me some time to detach.
I still haven't detached from my deceased son, but trauma specialists say that you never do, but that it does diminish.
Vacation was great with the two kids, and it didn't feel weird not to have my wife there (it would have been worse with her there - I think she would have complained too much).
The kids were going to visit their mother before college started, but then decided that they wouldn't have enough time. I suggested that they go for a weekend (it's only four hours), but that obviously means that seeing her has moved down in their priorities. They did have a lively skype with her for 1.5 hours that I heard echoing through the house.
One word to walkaway or runaway spouses - don't neglect or abandon your kids, because my experience shows that they will move away from you, as mine appear to have from their mother. Also, the research indicates that parental abandonment really screws them up, even if they are college kids (and college kids are still kids and need parents, as I've learned this year).
The comments about depression in the material posted about detachment is right on. Another source I read said that 80% of the people in his divorce recovery classes had at least one spouse with a mental problem. I've continued to see the marriage counselor after my wife left as an individual therapist (and at times there are two therapists in the session, with the other training mine in trauma therapy/EMDR). He said that my wife cutting off her kids is a sign that she is in a state of extreme grieving (called complicated grief).
Anyone curious about it can read The Deep End of the Ocean, a novel about a mother emotionally abandoning her kids and her husband after their middle child was kidnapped. The author interviewed numerous people who'd had kids kidnapped before she wrote it; in the story, the wife behaved much like mine has.
