After losing his best friend to brain tumors, Hal Potts' love remains unwavering in the face of another devastating diagnosis

A cat fight brought Trish Jackson and Hal Potts together on Oct. 15, 1987. "I was sharing a house with a friend and Trish came over with her friend, and I thought, 'Wow.' Within a minute the roommate's cats got in a fight, one got his eye slashed, and our friends left to take the cat to the vet. Trish and I spent the next four hours talking and getting to know each other.

"I had been single a long time in Nashville, dating a lot," Potts continues, "but within two weeks I knew she was the one. We got married two years later. When we took off from the Nashville airport for our honeymoon, sitting beside her, I felt like that was the best moment of my life."

A year later, Potts experienced another quick and strong connection, this time with Danny Petraitis, an effusive and outgoing musician newly arrived from New Jersey. "I met Danny when we worked in the same office building on Music Row," Potts recalls. "He noticed I was going to work out at lunch and invited himself along. He and his wife Bridgett had just moved here from Jersey and he was trying to meet people. That first day we spent an hour on StairMasters sweating our asses off and talking about everything. I had the same gut feeling about him that I had about Trish. That night I told her I had a sense he was going to have real meaning in my life."

Hal, Trish, Danny and Bridgett quickly bonded, experiencing their marriage milestones together. "We were newlyweds and didn't have kids, so we were going out and doing all the fun things people without kids do," says Hal. "Then our Bridgette was born and their Dylan, and we were off to the races."

The couples sped through the births of more babies — another girl for the Pottses, two more boys and a girl for the Petraitises. They spent birthdays, holidays, pizza parties, soccer games, dance recitals and endless summer days together. "We watched our lives change in ways we could never have imagined."

Then the truly unimaginable happened; Danny's dizzy spells were found to be caused by five brain tumors. Reeling, Hal stepped up for his loquacious friend, creating a CaringBridge website for Danny, a place where their family and friends could receive updates and offer support and encouragement. The first entry was Dec. 13, 2008.

Potts wrote late at night after everyone was in bed, posting every couple of days. The site was followed by hundreds of people, and notes to Danny numbered in the thousands as he battled to live. On June 4, 2009, at 4:15 a.m., Potts wrote, "Brother Daniel, I will miss you so very much." In his remarks at the memorial service in New Jersey, Potts quoted Robert Frost's three-word summary of what he'd learned of life: "It goes on."

But not always as expected.

On Feb. 27, 2012, friends of the Potts were shocked to find a CaringBridge notification for Trish in their inboxes. Titled "The Background," it was the first of many entries Hal would write late at night for nearly three years now, documenting what happened after Trish — a beloved middle school English teacher — found a lump in her breast. There were updates about the initial diagnosis of Stage III breast cancer, surgery, chemo, an escalation to Stage IV, radiation ... medical jargon, devastating discoveries and hard truths always woven with loving threads of family, friends, students, birthdays, trips and celebrations.

"I try to be as honest as I can," Hal says. "If I feel heartbroken or scared shitless, that's what I say. What's so hard to get into your soul is that with Stage IV, no matter how hard you fight, in the end it won't get better."

Through it all, Hal still feels about Trish as he did they day they married, 'Like I won the freakin' lottery." He says the hardest part "is living in limbo."

"But you can't put your life on hold, so you go on. I call it 'buying the ticket.' You want to see a concert three months down the road? You have no idea if that will happen. But you have to buy the ticket."

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