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Kaitlyn Cunningham Morse is the founder of Maine Aging Partners, which helps Maine families navigate long-term care with clarity, shaped by her own family’s roots in Presque Isle.
In Presque Isle, where my grandparents raised their family, Social Security wasn’t an idea in the abstract, it was part of daily survival. My grandfather worked at the local Social Security office, and when he died young, my grandmother was left with eight children and the long winters of Aroostook County to face alone.
Those checks didn’t solve everything. They didn’t take away grief, or lighten the work of keeping food on the table. But they were a lifeline. They allowed my grandmother to keep her family together, to hold on to her dignity, and to raise her children with some measure of stability. For her, Social Security was never a policy debate, it was life.
I think about that often now, as I sit with families making decisions about aging. The details have changed, but the questions remain the same: Who will stand with us when life shifts? Who will ensure stability when the ground feels shaky?
Today, Maine faces those questions in a new way. Families aren’t just wondering how to raise children after a loss, they’re asking how to care for parents in their 80s, or spouses in memory care, or themselves as they enter what I call “second retirement.” Systems that were designed to carry people through old age too often falter, leaving families to carry the weight alone.
I’ve lived this in my own way — knowing what it feels like to be ground down by structures that didn’t know what to do with me, and the strength it took to come back. That resilience is part of my story, just as my grandmother’s was part of hers.
As I watch my own boys grow, I think about what kind of Maine they’ll inherit. Will it be one where elders and their families are carried, the way my grandmother was? Or one where they’re left to navigate impossible choices alone?
When we build systems that keep their promises, families know they can trust the ground beneath them. That’s what dignity really means: not just a word, but the quiet assurance that no one is left behind in their most vulnerable moments. Not ideology, not partisanship — but the certainty that people come first when life changes.
Presque Isle taught me that. My grandmother’s story taught me that. And as Maine ages faster than almost any state in the nation, I believe it’s a lesson we can’t afford to forget.
