What's "normal" after twelve months

I met with Alex today. These days I sometimes feel like I don’t have many issues until I anticipate meeting with him and I begin to think about what we'll discuss.

Today I talked about dating and recognizing that I feel like I don't know what I want out of life or relationships. I feel like I need to figure out what relationships are about again and that whatever "ideal" I had when I met Robin no longer exists. Even the simple idea that I could plan to be with someone into old age doesn’t seem true anymore.

Alex's first observation was "you seem to be telling me this like it's not normal". That one year after losing Robin you're wondering why you don’t have everything figured out. He said, imagine I introduced you to a friend and this fellow had lost his wife of twenty years just twelve months ago. If he told the same story would it sound "normal" to you?

Boy, does Alex know how to make me laugh these days. Yep, I probably wouldn't be surprised that the fellow hadn't yet worked things out.

Secondly he noted that of course I couldn't make the same assumptions about relationships. The fact that Robin died proves that you can't just assume people will be around forever. He explained that as I form new ideas about what life is about, and about what relationships are about, the new ideas will have to naturally have to take this fact into account. How could they not - life has proven some of the original assumptions to be untrue!