Loss to Love: This Couple Found Love Again at Stewart’s Caring Place
She noticed his broad shoulders first. While attending tai chi classes in 2017 at Stewart’s Caring Place cancer wellness center in Fairlawn, Pam Matheny admired Edward Dietrich from afar.
“I was behind him,” Matheny says. “I thought, Oh, wow, he’s got some really nice shoulders. If he did turn to the side, I always looked the other way.”
Matheny began attending classes at Stewart’s — which provides continuous support to those with cancer and their loved ones via programs such as fitness classes and support groups — during her husband’s multiple myeloma journey. He died on Thanksgiving day 2016, just before their 51st anniversary.
Following his death, Matheny, now 78, returned to Stewart’s and took part in tai chi. About 15 months after his passing, she took off her wedding ring.
Her bare ring finger caught the attention of Dietrich, now 72, who’d been attending classes at Stewart’s following his wife’s 2014 death from breast cancer. He asked Matheny to go on a walk through the nearby Summit Mall. “I was pretty nervous,” Dietrich says.
The 2018 first date went well, and soon Matheny and Dietrich drove 30 minutes regularly to see each other in Bath Township and Brunswick, respectively.
“There was a glow about me,” Dietrich says. “Like I’m just shining from being with her.”
The pair had common interests, such as keeping fit — and both knew what it was like to lose a spouse to cancer.
“You already know, in your heart, where that kind of stuff lies — the troubles and the pain,” Matheny says. “It does help strengthen.”
Creating community among those affected by cancer — as its fitness classes did for this couple — is a core goal at Stewart’s
“There is so much that we know and are learning about stress and emotional capacity and what that does to our health. … Here at Stewart’s Caring Place, we understand. Many of us have walked the walk ourselves. I’m a survivor. We have survivors on staff,” says president and CEO Sarah Vojtek. “Things like massage, Reiki and yoga … are meant for the stress relieving component.”
“We are truly blessed as a couple,” Dietrich adds. “If you do meet somebody here … it’s going to be a good thing, for sure, especially if you’ve been through really some hard times.”
Originally posted to AkronLife.com on June 1, 2025 and published in Akron Life Magazine’s June 2025 issue.