I first contacted Fran in March of this year and we discussed her passion for real estate. She had spent much of the 1980’s as an investor and loved what she did. In the early 90’s her father fell ill and she dropped everything to become his caretaker. After a long battle with his illness he passed away. Shortly after the passing of her father, she became the caretaker for her birth mother whom she hardly knew.
For the better part of the 90’s she took care of her ailing parents and still looks after her mother who has Alzheimer’s. When I first spoke with Fran, she was gearing up for a big push back into real estate investment and we discussed her goals and how she planned to invest. During the course of taking care of her mother she started the arduous task of organizing her mother’s finances and discovered large sums of money that her mother had long since forgotten about. She explained that she planned to invest some of that money into real estate in the hopes of benefitting her mother and others in her situation, by taking the profits from her Real Estate company and helping elderly individuals who are ‘abandoned’.
Fran was excited to get back into real estate and getting started with FortuneBuilders and I was excited to see her pursue her passion after she selflessly took care of her family. The day after she moved into her new home she called me and we scheduled a call with James Pelletier for the next week so she would have her Internet up and running. A few days later she left me a message; concerned I called her back and she informed me that she had been diagnosed with intestinal cancer.
We had spent a lot of time on the phone and we had many conversations about her battles with cancer in the past; about how she has been in and out of treatment over the past few years. It seemed she was one of those unlucky individuals who just couldn’t get totally free of cancer. She was understandably depressed about the entire situation not just about the cancer but that her real estate goals would have to be put on hold once again. This was her fourth bout with cancer and she wasn’t sure she was going to be able to do it.
Her biggest fear was losing her hair again. “It just got down to the middle of my back. Now it’s going to be all gone again.” I tried to keep an upbeat attitude towards the outlook and we ended up laughing a little bit. She called me several days later to give me an update of her condition; she had started her first round of radiation treatment. Having started the fight against cancer again she set a new goal of walking her local American Cancer Society Relay for Life event. Relay for Life is an international fundraising event where participants take turns walking or running around a track in overnight events up to 24 hours in length, because cancer never sleeps
We joked about how she was going to get everyone she knew to donate one dollar to her charity through Relay for Life. I told her I would do it, and she gave me the link to her donation page. As soon as I went to her donation page, I realized she had not received a single donation yet. I decided to send an email to the sales floor to collect the funds for her $500 goal. Several people immediately donated and directly changed Fran’s life. She wrote a personal thank you letter to each person who donated to her cause.
She is truly a great lady and an inspiration. Her outlook on life, despite her circumstances and continued challenges, really put a lot of things in perspective for me. In the end, no matter how bad things get, you have to continue to move forward and to never give up on your passions.
