ADRIAN — Doors — both actual and metaphorical — can mean many different things. For those who have lost someone to death, doors can represent the portal to the journey their loved one has taken to the other side.

Giving families who’ve experienced such a loss a way to honor their loved one is the impetus behind Power of Passage, a program pairing families from Hospice of Lenawee’s bereavement program with artists from the Adrian Center for the Arts. 

The second edition of Power of Passage takes place this year.

Power of Passage was the brainchild of Adrian artist Pi Benio back in 2020. It was still relatively early in the ACA’s life and Benio wanted to raise its visibility in the local community. One day, she decided that partnering with another nonprofit would be a great idea.

“I woke up the next morning and the plan was fully formed in my head,” she said.

And with that, Power of Passage was born.

More than two dozen families, each matched with an ACA artist, participated in that first program. This year, 24 families and a corresponding number of artists are taking part.

Artists use full-sized doors, representing the idea of “passage,” as the basis of an art piece capturing the important elements of the life of each family’s late loved one.

The families answer a questionnaire, create a collage made out of magazine pictures showing things about their late loved one and what that person liked to do, and meet with the artist with whom they are paired. Then the artist goes to work.

“The idea isn’t to do portraits,” Benio said. “It’s to show what they loved in life.”

Families get to see their doors at a private gathering before the art goes on exhibit at the ACA, which is at 1375 N. Main St. on the campus of PlaneWave Instruments. This year’s exhibit takes place Sept. 15-28. After the exhibit closes, the families can take their doors home.

To capture the essence of each loved one, the artists might use all sorts of media, from paint to collage to clay, or might even turn their door into something else completely. 

“The sky is the limit,” Benio said.

One of the doors in the 2020 exhibit came from Benio herself, who created one to honor the late Dr. James Feeney. The door she created depicts his love of birdwatching, golf, and Ireland.

This time around, Benio is doing one in honor of her mom, who loved to travel and kept a journal of all the places she went. Benio plans to create her door with a road map theme showing those places.

She finds the process of creating these doors to be a powerful one. “It’s inspirational, and it makes you think about your own life: if someone were to make a door about me, what would it look like?” she said.

Pam Fisher of Adrian was one of the participants in the 2020 Power of Passage. Her husband, Peter, died of cardiomyopathy in early 2014.

It wasn’t exactly love at first sight when she and Peter met. In fact, at first “I couldn’t stand him,” she said, laughing. His father was chairman of the Bank of Lenawee, where Pam worked, and when Peter came to work there, he had the disadvantage both of being the chairman’s son and of looking “like a big-city banker” in his blue pinstriped suit.

“He had to have known I didn’t like him, and because of that he probably wasn’t too fond of me,” she said.

But all that changed one Christmas Eve, when the staff went to the Brass Lantern for a holiday gathering after the bank closed for the day. “People were dancing, and at one point he said, ‘Well, do you want to dance?’ ” Pam said.

She wasn’t too sure how she should respond, but she ended up saying yes — and as soon as they started dancing, “I knew I was where I belonged,” she said.

When the gathering was over, Peter asked if he could call her. And the rest, as the saying goes, is history. The pair were together for more than 30 years and married for almost 25 years.

“What we had was so special,” Pam said.

Not long after they married in 1989, Peter was diagnosed with the heart condition that would eventually take his life. But “he was active,” Pam said. “He did everything he wanted to do.”

That included fishing for bluegill at the lake where their home was at the time; baking pies — because she didn’t like making pies, he learned how to bake his own — and raising rhubarb for those pies, along with growing asparagus; collecting old Coca-Cola memorabilia; and traveling, especially to Maine.

And “he was just curious about so many things,” Pam said, citing as just one example the time in Kennebunkport, Maine, when she was in one of the shops and Peter, because he wasn’t into that sort of thing, wandered off, and when she came out of the store she had to go looking for him and found him down at the docks talking to a lobsterman.

In 2013, Peter started getting noticeably more tired and weak, and one night in late January 2014 he told Pam he needed to go to the hospital. His cardiologist told him he had three weeks to live and suggested Hospice.

Peter missed the three weeks by one day. He died on Feb. 20.

Throughout those all-too-brief final days with her husband, Hospice of Lenawee did everything possible for the couple, and was there for her afterward as well. “There are no words for me to describe how wonderful Hospice is,” Pam said.

When her Hospice grief counselor first suggested Power of Passage to her, she wasn’t sure she wanted to take part. But she did, and as the families sat together looking through magazines to create their collages, “people would say things like, ‘If anyone finds a picture of a deer, let me know,’ and you started to learn about these people,” she said. “And as we talked, it was a combination of bonding and bringing our loved ones back into focus.”

Her and Peter’s love of spending time in Maine was what artist Taina Mantey focused on in creating the door honoring Peter.

Based on a picture Pam provided, it shows a silhouette of Peter standing by the shore, facing away from the viewer and looking out at the ocean.

“I wonder what he was thinking,” Pam said.

She admits that working with Mantey to tell her about Peter was “a tough process.” But when she saw the finished product, “I just lost it,” she said, because it was so perfect. The door now has a treasured place in her sunroom.

This year, Blissfield resident Ben Nachtrab is eagerly awaiting the door that artist Peg Whiting is creating through Power of Passage to honor Nachtrab’s late wife, Leslie.

Ben and Leslie met thanks to a shared love of softball. An athletic woman who loved all kinds of sports, Leslie played on a team for which Ben was a substitute, and it didn’t take long for him to be smitten.

“I had such a crush on her and I didn’t know how to express it,” he said.

He started coming to the games even when he wasn’t playing, and then one day, when the team was at Fricker’s celebrating the end of the season, the conversation turned to what to do now that softball was done and “that was my ticket in,” he said. “I asked her if she wanted to play dodgeball.”

The two became a couple in September 2005, “and we were inseparable from there on out.” As it so happened, they even shared the same birthdate one year apart.

They married and had a son, whom they named Ben, and were looking forward to a long life together with all sorts of plans.

Then, in 2015, Leslie was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of cancer. Ben cared for her at home, with the help of Hospice of Lenawee, until her death on Jan. 9, 2016. She was just 38 years old, and Ben was 39, “and for the first time in my life I was alone,” he said.

“I didn’t know how to pay bills, I didn’t know how to raise my son,” who had just turned five.

“I was broken on the inside.”

Being a single dad was difficult. Besides the challenges of being both father and mother to his son, Nachtrab found himself “the elephant in the room” when he was the only father at school events or children’s birthday parties.

Not long before she died, Leslie told her husband that she wanted him to go on with life, and to give another woman the kind of love she herself had experienced. That happened in late 2017, when he took his son to a park and there met Stacy, who had two children of her own. The pair eventually married, and right from the start of their relationship, Stacy has honored Leslie’s memory.

Over the years since Leslie’s death, Nachtrab has remained connected with Hospice, grateful for the help they gave Leslie and have given him and his son. And so, when he was asked if he wanted to be a part of this year’s Power of Passage, he knew immediately that he did. He and Leslie’s best friend recently met with Whiting, the artist he was paired with, to begin the process of honoring Leslie’s life with a door.

To Pam Fisher, as hesitant as she was at first to get involved with Power of Passage, what came out of it was more than worth it.

“It was so interesting to me to see the other families’ doors,” she said. “And the way the artists listen, I mean truly listen. They seem to really want to create something that reflects what you told them.”

And for her, it helped keep alive the memory of the man she loved, and still loves, so deeply — “a way for me to be able to say, ‘Here he is.’ ”