A Naperville Husband's Filmmaking Passion Now His Widow's Mission

NAPERVILLE, IL — Sarah Potter has always considered herself creative. But admittedly, she was never the creative soul who thrived within the filmmaking world her husband loved so much.

A speech pathologist by profession, Potter has always served supportive roles in her husband Scott’s projects, but for years, her involvement never delved deeper. But when Scott suddenly came down with a severe case of pancreatitis that eventually spread like a forest fire, the Naperville couple’s life changed drastically, altering the way they considered their future together.

For six weeks, Scott appeared to be on the slow road to recovery. But doctors determined he needed what seemed at the to be routine surgery that would allow him to eat again. But during the procedure, an underlying infection caused other vital organs to start shutting down. For 24 hours, Scott hung on, but never awoke from the surgery.

And then, just like that, Scott was gone at age 36, leaving behind a wife, two young children and a film project he had just started that almost cruelly, centered around families living with a life-altering medical condition.

Now, Sarah — the working professional who had never been on a film set before her husband’s death — is determined to finish the film Scott was unable to complete. On Tuesday, Potter launched a $100,000 Kickstarter campaign that will hopefully raise enough money to allow a production company to finish the documentary film that has become more personal than Potter could have ever imagined.

The project initially was set to focus on families with children living with Acute Flaccid Myelitis (AFM), a neurological disease that causes muscle weakness that sometimes can lead to permanent paralysis. Scott had just started to conduct interviews for the project when he was hospitalized with the pancreatitis.

At first, the medical condition seemed like a temporary obstacle, but it soon became much more — eventually claiming Scott’s life and changing his wife’s forever.

“Before all of this happened, I was very much concerned with what you were supposed to do in life,” Potter told Patch on Wednesday. “There was the series of boxes you were supposed to check off like getting married, having kids, having your own home.”

But once Potter gave birth to the couple’s second child, she wondered, what now? The questions only deepened when Scott's health deteriorated before the couple's very eyes.

Scott – who grew up in Plainfield – seemed to be turning a corner for the six weeks after his initial diagnosis. While he and Sarah hoped for the best, they started to see life through a different lens. Priorities changed. Their relationship deepened. Choices were made. Everything changed.

And whether Potter knew it at the time or not, those six weeks were preparing her for a change she never saw coming.

“A lot of that (box-checking) stuff great, but it really doesn’t matter if you’re not doing what you love to do and what you want to be doing,” Potter said Wednesday. “It was kind of a quintessential be true to yourself (moment) and also that (feeling that) life is short and that you’re not going to have second chances necessarily.”

Just four months after Scott passed, his filmmaking mentor reached out to Potter and invited her on a film production trip to Hawaii as production intern. The idea was to give Potter an idea what it is like to be part of a film crew and what went into the actual production of the films to which Scott devoted his life.

Potter politely declined, providing the director with a myriad excuses of why she shouldn’t participate. But as she told family and friends about the opportunity, those closest to Potter insisted she go, telling her she would regret it if she didn’t. Potter finally relented and agreed to go.

With no expectations of what would come next, Potter suddenly found herself immersed in her husband’s world where those around her shared her late husband’s philosophy of storytelling and filmmaking. Before long, she was hooked, but not before she fought every urge to give into what she was feeling.

“I just felt so out of my element and anxious I didn’t belong there,” Potter said. “But when I got (to Hawaii), I realized that many of the skills that I have been educated in and experienced in my other positions, it was very similar – just demonstrated in a different way.”

It wasn’t long before Potter, who split her formative years between Joliet, Shorewood and Coal City, realized that working as a producer fell in line with being a mother. There were schedules to follow, crankiness to deal with, meals to plan. But compared to taking care of two small children, working on the film set seemingly felt manageable.

Potter was ready to take the leap into making storytelling a full-time career. She was no longer with doing a job that was “just OK” and that had been steady and reliable. Instead, she wanted to do something that would honor Scott’s memory and that would finish telling the story that he intended when the project began.

Potter quit her speech pathologist job in May 2021 and began the process of envisioning what finishing Scott’s project involved. At first, she did so because she felt like it was something she owed to her late husband.

But soon, Potter began to realize that Scott's passion has become hers and that the storytelling skills she felt like she never had could now be used to finish telling the filmmaking tale that Scott started before his illness and death.

“There was lots of self-doubt going into it,” said Potter, who worked as a speech pathologist in hospitals, nursing homes and schools for 15 years before moving to a role that has placed her on numerous film sets over the past year.

"But not only did I like what I was doing, but people were saying, 'Hey, you're good at this.' I can't tell you how validating that really was."

Before long, though, the doubts began to fade to black. Potter started to see her creativeness come out of her the way it did with Scott, who was a musician, artist and writer as well as a filmmaker. Scott had always been the creative one of the two, Potter said. But the more she became involved in storytelling projects, the more she realized that perhaps, her finishing Scott’s latest work wasn’t so crazy after all.

Since Scott’s death in 2020, the project has morphed into a film not only about families living with AFM, but also about dealing with expected life changes and grief. Potter had encouraged Scott to include his own medical journey into the film as a way of helping others deal with similar situations. He didn’t agree initially but then finally gave in as a way of expanding the audience of his project.

“Maybe this happened for a reason,” Scott told his wife of 13 years shortly before everything changed.

Now, along with telling the stories of others, Potter finds her own journey coming out although that part is sometimes difficult to deal with.

“It’s emotionally draining, it’s difficult to really think too much about it and fathom what has brought me to this place,” Potter said. “But it has also brought me a lot of joy and comfort at the same time.”

She added: “I know, to some extent, some of that (re-living grief) has to happen … there are sometimes when I am just completely drained, and I can’t work on it some days. That’s when I have to rely on the motivation and support I have around me to bring me out of that to continue to work on it.”

The film’s Kickstarter collected just more than $15,000 in its first day. The project is now entitled, “When The Lotus Blooms”. The title centers around the imagery of a Lotus flower, which can bloom even in the muddiest and murkiest of environments and that something beautiful can emerge from ugliness.

Since Scott’s death, Potter has experienced that feeling in her own way and now has a Lotus tattooed on her arm as a reminder of the journey she has endured thus far. Friends have given her photos of Lotus flowers and wine bottles with "Lotus" engraved into them, telling the mother of two how much the image reminds them of Potter and her late husband.

But Potter knows the journey — and the work to be done on the film — is far from over. But now, she begins to see the beauty Scott did when he first started the project, for which she will serve as director and oversee the film crew in the film.

“I think it’s been incredibly helpful to take something that was so awful and produced so much trauma and sadness and see it turn it into something that will ultimately be positive,” Potter told Patch.

“…I have to be open to the possibility that things are going to happen – good and bad. It’s a little bit of an easier thing to swallow, but you don’t spend so much time and energy thinking the worse when maybe the worst isn’t going to happen.”