Grieving can be a form of learning. Just ask Susan Huehn, whose new book, A Widow’s Guide to Becoming a Handyman, is a poignant and humorous chronicle of her experiences with grieving while teaching herself to tackle long-neglected repairs to the quirky 1800s farmhouse in Northfield that she shared with her late husband, Klaus. The daughter of German immigrants and raised in New Ulm, Huehn discovers grief to be as messy and overwhelming as the garage and sheds full of tools left behind after her husband’s unexpected death.
Huehn, now 60, met her not-so-handy husband at a music festival in her hometown in 1985. After a three-year transatlantic relationship, she relocated to Germany, where she lived with Klaus for three years. “We got married and then returned to Minnesota to live in Northfield on a small hobby farm,” she writes.
Throughout their relationship, Huehn became increasingly frustrated by her husband’s inability to complete common repairs. “Everything was unfinished and held together by duct tape and an instruction manual that existed only in Klaus’s head,” she writes. “The water was kept from freezing in the winter because Klaus knew that the water had to be kept running if the wind came from a certain direction. And in the event it froze, he knew where to put the hair dryer to thaw it.”
In alternating chapters, Huehn—who is the chair of the nursing department at St. Olaf College—recounts the story of their troubled-but-loving relationship along with her personal journey through resentment and forgiveness to eventual self-reliance.
“In therapy, I have since learned that we were unable to bring our problems to each other and work on them constructively to meet both of our needs, which I know caused unhappiness on my part and I suspect also on Klaus’s part,” Huehn writes. “That is a question I will unfortunately never have an answer to.”
October 24, 2023
6:51 AM