NEW YORK – After her husband of 52 years died, Susan Lucci didn’t think she’d ever feel joy again.
During her more than 40-year run on the ABC soap opera “All My Children,” Lucci’s character Erica Kane married 11 times. But off-screen, Lucci had a once-in-a-lifetime love. She married Austrian producer Helmut Huber in 1969 when she was 22 years old. They had two children together, Liza and Andreas, who they raised in Garden City, New York.
When Huber died in 2022, Lucci says she couldn’t listen to songs with lyrics. She felt “like half a person." But at some point, she started seeing signs.
First, it was the dimes. Suddenly, Lucci found them everywhere – two of them paired together on a bench, entire bags of them on her bedside table. Huber's birthday was Oct. 10 and he loved the double 10s in his birthdate, Lucci says. Then feathers started showing up in places where there were no birds or, at an outdoor dinner, landing on her place setting and no one else’s. It was a “tickle” from the man with a great sense of humor, she believes.
Lucci never planned to tell anyone about the signs, let alone write about them. But she felt compelled to put pen to paper. And more than just writing down memories of Huber, she realized she had lessons from her grief journey to share. In “La Lucci,” out now from Blackstone Publishing, Lucci holds her heaviest moments in one hand and joy in the other.
