Woman says her ex-husband disappeared from their children’s lives after cheating — and she only learned he was dead more than a week after it happened

A woman on Reddit said the final chapter of her marriage came with one more shock she never saw coming: she did not find out her ex-husband had died until well after it was over. In a story later collected by r/BestofRedditorUpdates, she wrote that she and her ex shared four children and had separated after he cheated on her with a coworker while she was undergoing brain aneurysm surgery. She said both marriages ended, the two of them moved away together, and from there he mostly vanished from the children’s lives and did not pay child support.

According to the BORU thread, the woman said the news of his death did not come from his wife, his family, or any official channel. She wrote that it had been more than a week before she and the children even learned he was gone. By then, she said, the damage from the years before had already left her emotionally detached enough that she did not feel the kind of grief other people seemed to expect from her. That reaction, and the guilt or confusion around it, is what pushed her to post in the first place.

The details in the roundup made clear why the situation landed so heavily with readers. In her account, this was not a case of an ex-husband who had simply drifted away after a mutual split. She described a man who blew up the family during a major medical crisis, relocated with the affair partner, and then left the children without meaningful support or presence. So when he later died by suicide, she said the dominant feeling was not heartbreak. It was more like numbness, mixed with anger over what the children had already lost long before his death.

Commenters on the BORU thread largely pushed back on the idea that she owed anyone a performance of mourning. A lot of the discussion focused on the difference between grieving a person and grieving what they should have been. Readers also zeroed in on the children, arguing that their emotional needs mattered more than judging the mother for not pretending the man had been a good father or husband just because he was gone.

By the time the story made the rounds, the question was not really whether she was “wrong” for not caring in the way people expected. It was whether years of betrayal, abandonment, and silence had already done the emotional work of separation long before death ever entered the picture. In that light, the post read less like coldness and more like a woman trying to name what was left after somebody had already burned through almost every claim to her grief.

Original Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/1r6x252/am_i_the_ah_for_not_caring_that_my_ex_husband_is/?utm_source=chatgpt.com