Susan Lucci on Living with Grief After Losing Husband of 52 Years (Exclusive)

All My Children’s scheming diva Erica Kane had to confront myriad challenges over the course of the daytime soap’s run of 40-plus years. There were at least 11 weddings to eight men, alcoholism and a doppelgänger who kidnapped her and tried to steal her life. She even once stared down a scary grizzly bear and frightened it off by bellowing, “I am Erica Kane, and you are a filthy beast!”

But the iconic antiheroine never had to face anything like the crushing grief her portrayer, Susan Lucci, had to endure when her husband of 52 years, Helmut Huber, died in 2022 at age 84, one month after suffering a stroke.

“The minute I fell in love like I did with my husband, I knew how vulnerable I was,” Lucci, 79, who played Erica from 1970 to 2011, tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story. “I was completely lost [after he died]. And it’s so isolating. You feel so alone, even though I had the most wonderful friend … I am so grateful for the people who stood by me.”

Lucci reflects on her experience with grief in her new book La Lucci (out Feb. 3 from Blackstone Publishing), the follow-up to 2011’s All My Life: A Memoir.

Surrendering to her vulnerability once again and sharing it with the world was a process that began “in the middle of the night,” she recalls. “I keep a pen and paper next to my side of the bed in case I get an idea or in case I have to write something down so I don’t keep rolling it around and memorizing it, so I could sleep. And in this case, I started waking up and things just started pouring out of me.”

Many of the words in La Lucci came to her in her sleep. When she was awake, the healing process was rough. “I felt like half a person,” she says. “I could hardly remember that I was an actress. It didn’t mean anything to me. I thought, ‘Do I do that? Really?’ I thought at that time I probably will never go in front of a camera or go on stage again.”

In the book, Lucci discusses her soap opera tenure and shares joyful memories from her five decades with Huber, an Austrian-born producer she married at age 22 after eight months of dating and with whom she shared two children, daughter Liza, 50, a former actress who played Gwen Hotchkiss on the daytime soap Passions, and son Andreas, 45.

She writes adoringly about Huber, a “classically trained chef” with “great sense of humor” who called her “Susie” and loved to drive fast, ski and golf, and cook her European comfort food. Asked what she misses most about him, Lucci says, “Everything. It’s hard to say one thing. I just miss him, miss his presence, miss sharing things together, like coffee in the morning.”

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These days Lucci, who will turn 80 in December, wakes up every morning on a mission: “I am looking for joy again,” she writes in her book. And although she finds it in work, travel, friends and “time spent with family, especially my grandchildren,” she still sometimes has to swim through waves of grief.

“I don’t fight it,” she says of the low moments, adding that they now wash over her less frequently. “I’m surprised sometimes by it. Certainly there are things like the holidays that are triggers — someone who should be sitting at the table. But I just go with it.”

And when grief threatens to swallow her whole, she has her memories of a lifetime spent with Huber and the wisdom he left behind, including a personal mantra he used to say in his “adorable” Austrian accent: “After the rain, the sun she shines.” For Lucci, those words have healing power. “They still help me,” she says. “His words stick with me. He was really my rock.”

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La Lucci will be released by Blackstone Publishing on Feb. 3 and is currently available for preorder, wherever books are sold.