It is Darkest Before Dawn A Story of Love, Loss and Sunlight Bill Shafer
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Judith and Mark Potter had carefully planned their future, but they would never get the chance to live it together. The Beginning of the End Mark didn’t want to retire but the network had other ideas. So here he was, his last day as an NBC News Correspondent. He spent his 41-year career traveling the world, often at a moment’s notice and always to areas under duress. War-torn countries, civil rights struggles, narcotics trafficking, hurricanes, earthquakes and more. He was accustomed to dealing with disasters, but unprepared for the challenge he was about to face. It was at his retirement party that Judith first mentioned the pain. What could it be? She was the one who was never sick, never complained. So they got to a doctor immediately and exactly one month after that came the catastrophic diagnosis: she had late-stage ovarian cancer. “I’ll never forget that day,” Potter said. “It was like
getting hit by a shotgun blast. The last thing either of us expected to hear.” The Potters were emotionally shattered, instantly thrown from full-time careers to full-time cancer care. "I’ve just been given a death sentence," Judith said. Potter immediately went into reporter-mode, calling friends, colleagues and contacts, desperately wondering what to do. He got ahold of the head of gynecological care at the Sylvester Cancer Center at the University of Miami who agreed to take Judith right away. That is when the Potters received their first ray of hope. “So many people have beaten cancer so we had high hopes we would, too,” said Mark. “The treatment worked. Judith went into remission, and we saw nothing but blue skies ahead.” That’s why the next test results were so devastating. The cancer returned and it was aggressive. Judith began to rapidly decline. Mark had just lost his mother, his father was in ill health and now his wife, his life partner, was slipping away.
- MARK POT TER
Photos by Mark Potter
“I feel her presence every time I see the sun rise.”
