Ohhh, wow. I’m sorry to hear about your situation – that sounds horrible.
While I’m not in anything like this sort of situation, I’m close to several people who are.
My wife’s stepfather (so, my stepfather-in-law) was married, and divorced, before meeting my mother-in-law. He’d had two daughters with his first wife, and, as I understand it, when he announced that he was remarrying, his daughters (who were, at that point, teenagers) decided that this was a betrayal of their family (despite the fact that it’d been their mother who had instigated the divorce), and they completely severed ties with him.
Now, my stepfather-in-law is one of the sweetest, gentlest, most caring people I’ve ever known. I obviously wasn’t there when he was getting divorced, but I cannot imagine that he would have ever done anything to warrant such treatment. It’s now been 30 years or so since his first family cut ties with him; I know that, some years back, he somehow learned that one of his daughters was getting married, and not being able to be part of it deeply hurt him.
One of my best friends grew up in Ireland; her mother was her father’s second wife (he’d divorced his first wife, a rare thing in Ireland in the 1960s). Her mother was a vain woman, and as her two children grew older, from what my friend has told me, she became increasingly resentful of them – having teenaged children meant that she, herself, was getting older, and thus, less desirable.
By the time that my friend married, at age 24, she was barely on speaking terms with her mother (who was, by then, divorced from her father). My friend and her husband moved to the US soon after, and she has had no contact with her mother since. She tells me that she’s tried to reach out a few times, but there was no interest whatsoever on the part of her mother, and she finally gave up. My friend is still in contact with relatives on her mother’s side, and does get the occasional update on how her mother is faring, but she’s resigned herself to the fact that she’ll never have a relationship with her.