my parents divorced after they retired as empty nesters. As I live in Ontario and they are in BC it didn't affect me as much as my siblings. When we see them now we do so separately. In recent years they have come together for family events even though both of them have taken up with new people.
I have always gotten along with them well socially but as parents I see them as failures. They have more or less tacitly admitted that they were. As a result, I am wildly overcompensating with the way I parent my kids. When my siblings and I get together we tell each other that whatever normalcy we have in our lives has been hard earned and uninherited.
My father refuses to pick up the phone or make any effort at contact outside of a few e-mails. His only grandson is less than an hour away and he makes no effort to be a part of his life. He is not someone I turn for advice because he's usually hammered when I call and is too apathetic about his kids to offer much. He offered nothing in the way of career advice, investment advice, education advice or any related encouragement - all of which he could have done for free.
My mother is much more accessible emotionally. She was depressed most of her life and was a stay at home parent. She was quite pampered and never had to work yet complained endlessly about my emotionally remote hard boozing father - always threatening to leave him. In the end he left her. I have always found her quite self absorbed.
Still, they are my parents and I would like to be closer so as to be of support in their declining years - not because they are so deserving but because doing so is still the right thing to do.