There Will Be No Closure So Stop Expecting It

We're familiar with the five stages of grief and many of us can point to various stages as we recount our experience with D-Day. Shock. Anger. Depression. And a whole lot of us are, in some ways, holding our breath until we're done with this experience. We await the day that it's over, we're healed. We rhapsodize about closure. Closure looks different for some of us but it often includes giving the Other Woman a piece of our mind.
So a whole lot of us are dismayed to discover that, no matter what we try, no matter how far out we are from D-Day, closure seems to elude us. We're never quite there. We never feel "over" betrayal.
To which I say, of course not. Cause I've learned the hard way (is there an easy way through this? Cause I don't know of one...) that closure is a myth. Rather, thanks to the work of Pauline Boss, I've come to understand that, where betrayal is concerned (among other life challenges), it's what she calls "ambiguous loss". And there is rarely closure where ambiguous loss is concerned.
Ambiguous loss, a term Boss coined in the 1970s, refers to loss where what we're losing isn't clear-cut. It's death-like rather than death. A spouse lost to addiction. A refugee fleeing the war-ravaged country they love. A child born with special needs. 
Betrayal.
We've lost the marriage we thought we had. We discover a spouse who's different than the one we thought we knew. We even, often, find ourselves capable of feelings we'd never imagined. Rage. Despair. Hatred. We've lost so much but we can't quite put our fingers on what it is.
Our grief is complicated. Our husbands aren't dead. In many cases, our marriages survive.
But everything's changed, hasn't it? We've lost...something. Complicating it further is the silence we frequently adopt. To the world, our lives are intact. There see no signs of loss, ambiguous or otherwise. 
Reality itself feels threatened.
And closure is little more than what we can expect from our front door, keeping the world at bay while we wrestle on the inside with our pain.
Part of moving through ambiguous loss – part of moving through life itself – is releasing ourselves of any expectation that things should be different. Ambiguous loss will not deliver closure any time soon. Or at all. Release any expectation of that. Grief is normal, no matter that your loss might not look like loss to anyone but you. 
Allow that grief. Invite it in. Move through it. Move through it again, because it will return, each time looking a bit different. 
Until the day comes when grief knocks, again, on your door and you recognize it. You again, you think. I know you. And I can handle you. You're not nearly so frightening. I can become your friend.
Grief has much to teach us, if we let it. And its teaching begins the day we accept that closure will continue to elude us because there is no such thing.