Node.js: what's the right way to do module inheritance?

Background

I'm making a simple web server using express.js on top of node.js. When I'm making the route handlers for my server I inevitably have to factor out some common functionalities. So I want to make a baseHandler which has all the common handler functionalities like DB connection, and when I'm writing other route handlers I want to 'extend' the baseHandler to conveniently obtain those common handler capabilities.

What I am trying

What are the ways of achieving it, and what is the correct way to do so? I am trying a pretty straight forward solution, I wrote baseHandler as a normal handler module, having a local mysql instance and exports the functions which manipulates the database. Code below:

// Mysql 
var _mysql = require('mysql');

// Mysql connection
exports.getDbHandle = function() {
    var mysql = _mysql.createConnection({
    host: xxx
    port: xxx
    user: xxx
    password: xxx
    database: xxx
});
return mysql;
};

Then in my route handlers I will simply require this module and use whatever functions it has. This seems to solve the problem, but I have a feeling that it is not the right way to do it. As I will have an instance of the baseHandler module in my route handler and it feels like a utility module, rather than a part of the route handler on its own.

Question

So what is the right way to extend modules in nodejs?