After losing six family members, a broker rebuilt his life
“My grandmother first passed away at the age of 95, and a few days later, in a very awful simultaneous event, I lost five additional family members in the same day,” he said. “My mother, my aunt, my cousin, my two uncles. It was a total of five people on that day that passed away. My life changed immediately because it was six people in that one week, and everybody on my mother’s side.”
Kearns said the period that followed was defined by a decline in his own mental health, even though the rest of his life continued to turn without slowing down.
“I went through a time period of deterioration, mental health, all of that,” he said. “I still had responsibilities. I’m still a father, still a husband, a business owner, all of that. Eventually, life did not allow that previous way of operating, that previous way of living, to continue. I quite literally had to make survival decisions in order to proceed forward.”
While the pressures of the mortgage industry did not create the underlying issues in his life, they gave him a way to avoid facing them.
“The industry did not in particular create what was broken inside of me, but it gave me parts of a scoreboard that I could measure myself against,” he said. “The production and the money shined a light on the cracks that were already there in my life. And then tragedy struck, and it made the cracks impossible to ignore. My message to people is you don’t have to let tragedy strike before you make those adjustments in your life.”
