Susan Lucci has spent decades playing women who survive heartbreak, but nothing on screen prepared her for losing the man she calls the love of her life. After her husband of 52 years, Helmut Huber, died, the soap legend says she felt “completely lost,” unsure how to move through a world that no longer included him. Now, four years later, she is slowly, deliberately chasing joy again, even as grief still taps her on the shoulder.
At 79, the longtime All My Children star is letting fans in on what that journey really looks like: the isolation, the “grief triggers,” and the tiny daily rituals that keep her husband close. Through her memoir La Lucci and a new wave of candid interviews, she is turning a deeply private loss into something quietly instructive for anyone learning to live with an empty chair at the table.
From “completely lost” to cautiously hopeful
When Helmut Huber died, Susan Lucci did not try to pretty it up. She has said bluntly that she was “completely lost,” a phrase that lands hard coming from a woman who built a career playing unflappable divas. The soap actress, now 79, describes those early months as a kind of emotional free fall, marked by isolation and a sense that the life she knew had simply vanished beneath her feet, a reality she has opened up about in detail with Susan Lucci. She has credited the people who refused to let her disappear into that loneliness, the friends and family who simply stayed put when she could not yet imagine what “moving on” might look like, a support system she has also acknowledged through Eric Todisco.
Four years out, the language she uses has shifted. Lucci now says she is “looking for joy again,” a subtle but important change from simply surviving to actively seeking out moments that feel good. She writes that this new phase is less about erasing grief and more about letting work, travel, and connection coax her back into the world, a mindset she threads through her memoir La Lucci. As she puts it in one reflection, time has not made the loss smaller, but it has made it slightly more livable, a perspective echoed in coverage of how Lucci is rebuilding her days.
A 52-year love story that still shapes her days
Part of why the loss hit so hard is simple math. Susan Lucci and Helmut Huber were married for 52 years, a stretch of time that covered her rise from daytime newcomer to household name. She has been clear that Huber was not just a spouse but a partner in every sense, the person she leaned on as her career exploded and the one who handled the chaos behind the scenes so she could focus on the work, a dynamic she revisits when she talks about the 52 years they spent together. In her telling, he was the steady one, the person who could cut through drama with a joke or a plan, the “rock” she built her life around, a description she repeats in more than one profile.
That history is at the heart of La Lucci, where she reflects on their 52-year marriage with a mix of gratitude and disbelief that it is now something she has to write about in the past tense. In an excerpt shared from the memoir, Susan Lucci looks back on meeting Helmut Huber, on the life they built, and on the small, ordinary rituals that now feel sacred, a portrait that has been highlighted in coverage of how Susan Lucci remembers Helmut Huber. She writes about Huber, a hospitality pro who became her fiercest advocate, with the kind of specificity that makes it clear this is not just nostalgia, it is an ongoing relationship that now lives in memory and daily habit, a theme that runs through multiple tributes to Huber.
Grief triggers, gentle rituals, and the work of remembering
Lucci is not pretending that four years is some magic finish line. She talks openly about “grief triggers,” those random moments that yank her back to the rawness of the first days. It might be a song, a restaurant, or a place they loved, and suddenly she is right back in the ache, a pattern she has described in detail while explaining how Susan Lucci still feels her husband’s presence. She has even talked about the specific times of day that hit hardest, like late at night or early morning, when the house is quiet and there is no distraction from the empty side of the bed, a rhythm that has been noted in coverage that timestamps her reflections at 10:33 and 11:38 EST in one detailed account. She has said there are “certainly things” that instantly remind her of how deeply he loved their family, a line that has resonated with readers who recognize their own sudden waves of sadness in her words.
At the same time, she has built small, steady rituals to keep him close without getting stuck in the past. In an exclusive excerpt from La Lucci, she explains that she honors her late husband of 52 years every single day, often in quiet ways that would be invisible to anyone else, a practice she frames as a choice to remember rather than to “feel sad all the time,” a distinction she spells out while reflecting on how time works on grief. She has also talked about how the writing process for La Lucci started “in the middle of the night,” when she would wake up and jot down memories, a habit she describes as both cathartic and exhausting in accounts of how Isolated Susan Lucci turned her insomnia into pages.
Writing La Lucci and letting the world in
For someone who spent decades in front of cameras, putting the most painful parts of her life on the page was a different kind of exposure. Lucci has said that the writing of La Lucci began almost accidentally, with notes scribbled in the dark when she could not sleep, a process she has described as starting “in the middle of the night” while she was still deep in shock, a detail she has shared while talking about how Daytime Emmy Award winner found her voice on the page. Over time, those fragments turned into a full memoir, one that does not just revisit her All My Children years but lingers on the private moments with Huber that never made it into fan magazines, a shift in focus that has been noted in coverage of Jeremy Helligar, the Deputy Editorial Director who helped shape how those stories reached readers.
Lucci is clear that the book is not a grief manual, but it does offer a kind of roadmap for how she is trying to live now. She writes that “time” is a “gentle healer when it comes to the loss of joy,” a line that has been pulled out repeatedly because it captures her refusal to rush herself back to “normal,” a stance she elaborates on in excerpts that show how Lucci balances honesty and hope. The memoir also circles back to her long run on All My Children, where she became synonymous with Erica Kane, a character whose resilience now feels like a preview of the woman behind her, a connection that has been highlighted in a recent Instagram reel that frames Susan Lucci as opening up about losing her “love of my life.”
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