How my Heart Broke

The Legacy We’re Losing

The other night I was driving through Bath, Maine, and I pulled into the parking lot of the Plant Home.
I didn’t plan to stop there. I just needed a moment to breathe. But I sat in the dark for a long time, staring at the windows glowing above the river.

That building has always meant something to me. It’s where I learned that even when the mission is right, the system can still fail.

And tonight, it’s where I finally admitted to myself: this isn’t just one building. It’s the whole damn industry.

The Families Who Built It

Take Craig in Casco. He runs one of the last small assisted-living homes left in Maine — the kind of place that feels like home. It’s not glamorous, but it’s safe, loving, full, and steady.

Craig is smart, practical, independent. He’s exactly the kind of person Maine needs leading its future in elder care. And yet, like so many others, he’s planning to leave the field. Not because he wants to, but because the math doesn’t work anymore.

And then there’s Chris.
His family helped build one of Maine’s flagship senior-living campuses — a property that once stood for everything good about aging in place. They grew it, improved it, and over time brought in new investors to sustain it. That’s what responsible families do.

But the model changed faster than the mission could keep up. When ownership shifted to larger investment groups, the business started to look more like a portfolio than a promise. Chris hung on as long as he could. But he has a daughter, a family, a future to think about. Eventually, even he had to walk away.

Two men, two families, two legacies — both gone from a field that desperately needs them.

A National Pattern

This isn’t just a Maine problem.
Drive forty minutes west of Lexington, Kentucky, and you’ll find Shelbyville — a community full of small, heartfelt assisted-living homes just like Craig’s. Places like Crescent Place and Amber Oaks that still charge between $3,000 and $4,000 a month and manage to survive by being rooted in their towns.

But the same storm is rolling in there, too.
Costs rise. Staff disappear. Owners age out. Corporate buyers circle. And the few who care most deeply about keeping the work personal start to realize they can’t do it forever.

That’s the warning sign.
When the small, family-run buildings — the Craigs and the Chrises of every state — start walking away, it means the foundation is cracking nationally.

I’ve been saying this for years, long before the shutdowns and funding fights and Medicaid delays started choking the system. And I was left standing alone.

The Cost of Telling the Truth

When I first started speaking up about what I saw — the pricing, the gaps, the policies that quietly reward consolidation — people I’d known for years went silent.

I wasn’t a publicly traded real estate trust.
I wasn’t a politician with a platform.
I was a woman with a background in the business and the nerve to say what everyone else already knew: the middle of senior care is collapsing.

And instead of backing me, people just stepped back.

What We’re Really Losing

It’s not just buildings or jobs or market share. It’s inheritance.
Craig and Chris grew up in families who believed that caring for older people was a calling worth dedicating your life to. It was their legacy.

If even those families — conservative, progressive, deeply rooted, deeply Maine — can no longer sustain that work, then what hope do the rest of us have?

Because this isn’t about bad care. It’s about a system that no longer rewards good people for doing the right thing.
And that’s not local. That’s national.

What It Feels Like Now

The other night, sitting in that parking lot in Bath, I thought about all of it — the Craigs, the Chrises, the Kentuckys, the corporate roll-ups, the shutdowns, the vouchers that don’t stretch far enough, the friends who went quiet when I started naming names.

And for the first time, I realized I wasn’t mourning the industry.
I was mourning the promise that legacy still mattered.

Because if we can’t keep men like Craig and Chris — people who care deeply, who invest in both real estate and humanity, who believe Maine’s future depends on how we treat its oldest citizens — then what exactly are we building?

We aren’t just losing beds. We’re losing our backbone.

The Final Line

I used to believe we could fix this.
Now I just hope someone’s listening.

Because the truth is simple:
We didn’t lose senior care to greed or neglect.
We lost it to indifference — to the quiet decision, over and over again, to walk away when the people who built it started sounding the alarm.

And that’s how legacy dies in America.
Not with a scandal.
But with silence. KCMM