PITTSBURGH — Shirley Whitlinger knows all too well the profound, existential loneliness that follows a spouse’s death.

When David, her husband of 50 years, died from prostate cancer in 2021, after two years of chemotherapy and trials at Hillman Cancer Center, it was almost impossible not to lose herself in grief.

The couple had spent nearly every day together since meeting in 1967 at Robert Morris College, where both studied accounting. They married in 1971, got jobs working with numbers and spent the next half-century building a fulfilling life together. Then, she was suddenly single in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I struggled with how to be by myself,” the West Deer resident admits.

A deep daily grief slowly evolved into self-pity over four years.

Whitlinger finally learned to move forward last year, she says, with the help of a support group and, more recently, a beloved hobby that started in childhood: sewing. Three months ago, she started making keepsake “memory” bears from a piece of clothing in honor of a lost loved one.

The Ambridge native was 12 when her Aunt Eleanor took her on vacation to Conneaut Lake, a summer resort in Crawford County. To keep the tween busy, she gave Whitlinger an alphabet sampler to practice embroidery in easy-to-learn red and green cross stitches. She didn’t just finish the project — she was hooked.

By junior high school, using paper patterns and fabric from J.C. Penny, Whitlinger was sewing her own clothes on a machine.

“And I made drapes for our house and cottage at Conneaut,” she remembers with a laugh.

There was something about creating with her hands that she found incredibly satisfying.

Conneaut’s historic amusement park with its creaky Blue Streak wooden roller coaster has closed, but the craft of using a needle and thread to stitch clothes and decorative items has remained part of Whitlinger’s life. Using those skills to provide tangible comfort to people who are grieving, she says, has helped with her own emotional self-care and healing.

“The fact I can do it and give people some peace ... it’s just contentment for me,” she said.

Whitlinger credits Parkwood United Presbyterian Church in Hampton, which she and her husband joined many years ago, with getting her life back on track in February 2025.

Sensing she was lost, member Tim McDermott suggested she sign up for the Christian-based support group called GriefShare that the church was launching.

Open to the congregation and to the community, the group’s goal is to help people deal with the loss of a loved one through small-group discussions, videos and journaling. She agreed, joining a group of about 15 in the 13-week program that included Lora Berry of McCandless, who’d lost her husband, George, to liver cancer that February.

Upon learning that Whitlinger liked to sew, Berry asked if she would make her a memory bear similar to those she’d seen online from her husband’s favorite sweater. Whitlinger — who had taught classes for the Viking Sewing Gallery within Joann Fabrics — agreed, even though she’d never made one of the soft, huggable teddy bears in her 60-plus years of sewing.

“I was lonely and looking for a purpose,” she says.

The hardest part, the seamstress soon discovered, was making that first cut in the precious green fabric because “there was no turning back.”

Surprisingly, the cut-out parts went together so perfectly that Whitlinger found it difficult to stop and finished sewing and stuffing the bear — free of charge — in just 12 hours over two days. The pad of the bear’s bottom right paw has a bright red embroidered heart; the left paw sports a bright yellow butterfly, a symbol of new life.

“I couldn’t wait to give it back,” Whitlinger says. “It was my honor to do this in memory of someone.”

Berry, who has since has become a close friend, loves the comforting keepsake made from her husband’s sweater.

“It means so much to me,” she says. Hugging the bear “brings me peace. It’s like a hug from him. It connects me.”

Whitlinger found the experience so rewarding that when she decided earlier this year to become a volunteer with faith-based Good Samaritan Hospice, which cared for Berry’s husband when he was sick, she asked volunteer coordinator Erin Boyles if she could also make them for patients.

“She told me, ‘You’re going to be quite busy, and I thought, ‘Oh, right.’”

Boyles was on the money: Almost immediately, she got a request to make five bears for a woman whose sister-in-law had died and wanted to give each of her caregivers a gift to remember her by.

On a recent Tuesday, Whitlinger was putting the final touches on bear No. 8 as she visited with Berry. No. 9 was sitting in pieces on the dining room table next to her professional Viking Husqvarna sewing machine, and No. 10 was ready to be lined with cotton to prevent the loved one’s shirt from stretching.

“I miss my husband dearly, but one good thing about living by yourself is you can spread out all over the place,” she says.

Signature touches on each include a red embroidered heart and the seamstress’s initials, SJSW, on the right paw, and a button or other small embellishments on the left. Making them even more special is the stuffing. The Poly-fil fiber fill came from a bag donated by a man who wanted to do something in honor of his wife.

“That moved me,” Whitlinger says.

She does the finishing work in a small bedroom facing woods by her house. She and her husband agreed it would make a great sewing room when they bought the house in 2019, less than two years before he died. A quilt his father, David Sr., won an award for at a quilt show years ago provides inspiration on a far wall.

In the past few months, the seamstress has made so many bears (she counts about 15) that she had to replace the original paper “Melody” patchwork pattern because “it can only take so many pinholes.” It wasn’t until No. 6 that she felt like she had mastered the (very) tricky final step of sewing the head to the body and started to understand the full impact of what she was doing on others.

One unexpected perk of her bear-making, she says, is the friendships she’s made. After spending so many days alone, she’s now having lunch and going shopping with the people she’s met through the hospice program. “We’re there for each other.”

Grief, Whitlinger says, is something you don’t ever grow out of. But you can learn to live with it.

“My husband always said if there’s something you want to do, do it because you don’t know about tomorrow,” she says. “So I’m in a good place. I’m just so thrilled I found something I can do for someone else.”

The only drawback is saying goodbye to the keepsakes.

“I do miss them when I give them back.”

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If you would like a memory bear honoring a loved one, contact Good Samaritan Hospice volunteer coordinator Erin Boyles at eboyles@good-samaritanhospice.org.

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