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When the doctor made the pronouncement: “Time of death 11:58 am” I felt myself grow hot from the steady pulse of fear in my stomach as the reality of his words sank in.

Fear took over. Fear of the basement. Fear of the mail.

When Klaus died, my physical safety was not threatened, but my emotional well-being certainly was. Stress hormones couldn’t differentiate between physical and emotional threats and sent my autonomic nervous system into overdrive. Hormones poured out to prepare me to respond to imminent danger which had already happened. Nausea, dizziness, shortness of breath, and heart pounding accompanied persistent grief, doubt, and fear.

Trauma was stuck in the box that was my body, leaving me not knowing which way was up. And my masterful mind was stuck in limbo, trying to rationalize emotions and physiological responses.

Fear was constant, large, and ambiguous. Without a ravaging bear to focus on, my mind made up colorful tragic scenarios all centered on my not having the skills to make it on my own. Fear of the roof falling in, my septic exploding, and ending up in an alley eating Seafood Delight topped my list of things to fear. Of those, only one of them happened, but I guess you will have to read my book to find out which one.

Susan Huehn’s book The Widow’s Guide to Becoming a Handyman is a big-hearted and artfully-crafted memoir of passionate love, sudden loss, and messy grief set in a farm house restoration project. Readers whose anguish hasn’t followed the stages of grief in blue print order will appreciate Susan’s DYi-ing of her emotions and renovations after the premature death of her husband, Klaus. I love memoirs that interrogate and challenge accepted norms: this book gives us all space to rethink the grieving process. 

From Nicole Helget, author

One of my objectives in writing this book was to challenge the linear process that I believed grief was until I was in the midst of sudden loss and experienced something different. Maybe grief didn’t have a beginning, middle and end as I had told so many patients over the years? And what if we never finish grieving?

A Widow’s Guide to Becoming a Handyman will warm your heart while also, gently, breaking it. Susan Huehn takes us on a tumultuous and chaotic journey of love and grief that is both tender and transformative. Telling the story of her marriage and her sudden, unwanted widowhood, she reminds us that the work of love is always, necessarily, also the work of repair. Her candor, vulnerability, and wisdom make this grief memoir as much about self-discovery as about healing from traumatic loss. –Karen Hering, Trusting Change: Finding Our Way through Personal and Global Change and Writing to Wake the Soul. 

Book Launch in the Bier Halle at Schell’s Brewery, New Ulm, MN 4-7pm

The past few days have been a roller coaster of weather in Minnesota. Last week we set record temperatures in the high eighties, today it is 30 and snowing. Air conditioning? Furnace? Some days in Minnesota you need both. One in the morning and the other later in the afternoon. But as Minnesotans, we expect wildly fluctuating weather conditions – we often say “If you don’t like the weather now, wait five minutes.”

Grief was also wildly fluctuating, but I didn’t expect it.

Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. “That was the correct order, wasn’t it?” I checked with my nurse brain as I tried to put my emotions into neat compartments. I learned about them as a nurse, never questioning their accuracy. I talked about them with patients, but never once considered how they would play out if I was the actor on the main stage.

It seemed as if time stood still, and I was suspended in space. When would the tidy grief I learned about in nursing school begin? I needed the kind of grief that started with one stage, proceeded along a linear path, and cleanly end with following the last stage.

I vowed to ask for help. “I am going to do whatever is necessary to work through the five stages of grief as quickly as possible,” I said to whoever would listen, mainly to convince myself that I would soon return to my former self and my former life. It did not yet seem ridiculous to me that I could order my emotions into tidy and linear boxes with a distinct beginning and end.

The Widow’s Guide to Becoming a Handyman, Chapters 7 and 11