I'll chime in too with my own experience, especially since I've been posting you telling you that part of your anguish comes from being in a relationship with a dream.
I've had to let go of a lot of unanswered questions. I was looking for closure but was between a brick and a hard place. I realized that if I asked the ex this or that question, I likely wouldn't get an honest reply, or if I did, I might not trust it to be the truth, or it may just push her away. And certainly, I could always come up with yet another question, and another, and another... So it slowly dawned on me that "closure" is a catch-word, it doesn't necessarily heal anything, in fact, knowing things can hurt more than just letting it all go, as GH so brilliantly suggested.
The WASs are the ones that have to live with themselves regarding what they chose to do, knowing the full truths - we're the ones that don't have to live with it, it's not about us. We only own what we did, not what they did. They're the ones that have to wrestle against the pain of their guilt, let us not share in that pain and ask them to hand some over to us!
Letting go also of the "if onlys" and "what it could be" and seeing our spouses for the bad they are/were helps us see things as they are/were, which is a more realistic, balanced view of them, which takes a lot of the edge off of the pain after a while, because we realize then that what we had, before things went south with them, was probably as good as it gets, and wasn't going to get better, and so, we got it all already.
We realize too that what we lost includes all their bad stuff as well as the good, and that's a relief, really.
