Flo Leighton
The rain had moved through Biddeford overnight and finally cleared around 8 on Monday, September 14th. An hour later, Florence “Flo” Leighton walked into the Biddeford Mills carrying a handbag and sunglasses, dressed in white and wearing the enormous smile that tends to arrive before the rest of her.
Leighton is a psychiatric nurse practitioner, therapist, former university educator and independent practice owner. She is also deeply involved in Biddeford, a city she had no connection to a little more than five years ago and one that wasn't even on her original list of places to live.
Ask how that happened, though, and Leighton doesn't begin with a committee, an award or a professional accomplishment. She begins with a $59 JetBlue ticket.
How a $59 Flight Introduced Flo Leighton to Maine
In December 2017, Leighton was living in New York and spotted a $59 JetBlue flight to Portland. She had never been to Maine, but a cheap flight and an inexpensive winter stay in Kennebunkport were reason enough to give it a try.
There was snow on the ground and along the beach when she arrived. For Leighton, who has always found something restorative about the ocean, the connection was immediate.
“If I need to find my peace, you will find me at the beach,” Leighton said. “I knew back then, oh, this will not be my last time here.”
She was right. Three years later, however, Maine would mean something very different.
In 2020, Leighton was teaching nurse practitioner and undergraduate nursing students, maintaining her private practice and working at a pace she now recognizes as unsustainable. She estimates she was responsible for roughly 130 students and had about 500 active patients.“I’m working three jobs. I don’t feel particularly happy,” she said. “On paper everything looks perfect, but I’m not taking good care of myself.”
In the middle of all of that, Leighton lost her oldest sister, Bambi, to COVID-19.
Losing Her Sister Changed Flo Leighton's Life
Bambi was 17 years older than Leighton and, in many ways, another mother. She was also a nurse, working in intensive care and caring for COVID patients in New York when she contracted the virus herself.
Leighton was caring for New Yorkers navigating their own anxiety, isolation and uncertainty while
absorbing an enormous loss of her own. Three days after Bambi passed, George Floyd was killed, adding a national racial reckoning to an already overwhelming period of Leighton's life.
“That was the impetus to me really taking a critical look at my life and asking, what am I doing?” Leighton said. During a period when travel became possible, she returned to Maine. She walked the beach, grieved and found herself able, at least temporarily, to “feel like a normal human.”
“This was divine timing for me,” she said. “I just remember being able to come here and find my peace.”
Six years later, Leighton can laugh about Bambi and the things her sister taught her. The grief hasn't disappeared, and there are still moments when the loss catches her.
“I think she would be really happy where I landed,” Leighton said.
Where Leighton landed makes considerably more sense when you understand where she came from.
A Family of Nurses Shaped Flo Leighton's Career
Leighton's mother was a nurse, and four of eight children in the family became nurses. Flo and Bambi even attended nursing school together despite their 17-year age difference, with Bambi serving as president of the Student Nurses Association and Flo as treasurer.
Their interests were very different. Bambi thrived in intensive care settings, while Flo quickly discovered that she wasn't interested in the “blood and guts” side of nursing.
“I was always the person that didn't want to do the blood and guts, loved human connection and long relationships,” she said. Her mother had spent the final 20 years of a varied nursing career working in mental health. Leighton remembers occasionally seeing her at work and understanding that nursing could be about far more than treating an immediate physical problem.
Today, Leighton proudly describes herself as a second-generation psychiatric nurse. But when she first considered becoming a psychiatric nurse practitioner, she was warned that there weren't enough jobs and that she wouldn't be marketable.
She listened to the advice and enrolled in a family nurse practitioner program instead.
Her path changed again when, at 34 years old, Leighton was diagnosed with cancer.
Cancer Brought Flo Leighton Back to Mental Health
Her son was 10 at the time. Leighton withdrew from school, underwent six months of treatment and continued working full time.
The cancer responded to treatment, and Leighton is now 15 years in remission. The experience also introduced her to depression in a way her nursing education never could.
When treatment ended, she searched for other survivors who might understand what she had experienced. She couldn't find the kind of support she was looking for. So she helped create it.
Leighton started a Leukemia & Lymphoma Society support group at Good Samaritan Hospital in Suffern, New York. “If I'm searching for it and can't find it, I can't be the only one,” she said. The experience helped point her back toward the field she had wanted from the beginning. She returned to graduate school with a clearer sense that mental health was where she belonged.
Looking backward, Leighton sees a pattern that extends well beyond her career.
“If I were to write a book one day, the story is that on the heels of something incredibly painful, on the other side of it, there's something really beautiful,” she said. “It's not and/or. It's both for me.”
That pattern had actually begun long before cancer.
The Part of Flo Leighton's Childhood She Doesn't Always Share
Leighton is the daughter of immigrants. Her father came to the United States from Jamaica, while her mother arrived from the Philippines in 1965 and built a nursing career in New York. Leighton grew up in Blauvelt in Rockland County, in a largely white community where she remembers overt racism directed toward her family. She also remembers an extraordinarily hardworking woman doing what was necessary to provide for her children.
After Leighton's parents divorced, her mother was essentially raising the children alone while working two full-time nursing jobs. There was little margin for anything beyond keeping the household moving.
“I think some of the struggles I was having kind of fell through the cracks,” she said.
She doesn't blame her mother for that. “I love her for who she is,” Leighton said. “I forgive her for who she wasn't.”
Then, during the interview, Leighton revealed a part of her adolescence she doesn't always talk about. At 17, she entered the shelter system and became an emancipated minor.
The woman sitting in the Biddeford Mills with graduate degrees, a healthcare practice and years of university teaching behind her had once been a teenager whose future was anything but certain. What Leighton remembers most from that period are the people who didn't confuse her circumstances with her potential.
“There were always role models and mentors in my life that saw potential in me and wanted to give me opportunities,” she said. “This is a kid that has ended up here. I don't think that she's going to stay here. How do we help her?”
People changed schedules for her. They let her bring her young son to work. They created enough room for her to keep moving forward. Leighton became a mother at 23, just weeks before her 24th birthday. She worked full time through her bachelor's degree and later through her master's while raising him.
Decades later, she hasn't forgotten the people who made things a little easier when her own life was difficult.
“I feel a duty to give that back,” Leighton said.
That sentence explains a lot about what happened after she arrived in Biddeford.
Why Flo Leighton Chose Biddeford, Maine
By 2021, Leighton knew she wanted a different life.
Her son had gone to college, telehealth had changed where she could work and years of commuting in New York City had lost its appeal. She wanted to remain within driving distance of her aging mother, and Maine kept that possible.
Her son complicated the decision in an important way. With Jamaican, Filipino and Puerto Rican heritage, he told his mother during a visit that he felt conspicuous in some Maine communities and didn't always feel safe. “It made me rethink that five-hour driving-distance search for a house,” Leighton said. “I have to honor that this is how he feels.”
She found a realtor who is a woman of color that understood the concern and began looking more intentionally. Portland, South Portland and Westbrook were on the radar. Biddeford wasn't. The housing market was moving quickly, and Leighton estimates she toured or visited 50 to 60 homes. She spent roughly two weeks in Maine, squeezing house hunting around patient appointments and driving through neighborhoods to get a feel for places where she knew no one.
On the final day, she had already checked out and planned to leave for New York that afternoon.
Then a house in Biddeford appeared. “I did not realize this house happened to be in Biddeford, which was not on my radar. This was a really special house,” she said. “And I could see myself living here.”
She submitted an offer and started driving back to New York. It was accepted.
But the life Leighton thought she was bringing to Maine had changed dramatically just weeks earlier.
Starting Over Alone in Biddeford
When Leighton began looking for a house in Maine, she wasn't planning to start over alone. She was engaged, had been in a relationship for about nine years and expected the next chapter of her life to include a partner.
By the time she found the house in Biddeford, that plan had disappeared.
Leighton ended the relationship in early July, 2021. Nineteen days later, she closed on her new home.
For a nurse and lifelong caregiver, the decision forced her to confront something she understood professionally but had struggled to recognize in her own life.
“We are natural caregivers. We are natural fixers,” she said. “We see the potential in people at the expense of knowing who's exactly in front of you.”
There is a difference, Leighton realized, between believing someone or something can become better and building your own future around the possibility that it eventually will.
“I also don't have to wait around for it to get better,” she said.
The timing made the move more daunting. Leighton had grown up in a large family, became a mother and spent much of her adult life surrounded by people who needed her or depended on her. The house in Biddeford wasn't simply a change of address anymore. “I owe this to myself to try out a different place,” she said. “And to be able to prove to myself that I could do it on my own.”
That meant accepting some uncertainty. Leighton didn't know whether Maine would work, whether she would make friends or even how she would feel once summer became winter and the excitement of buying a house wore off.
But New York wasn't going anywhere. She could return if she needed to.
For once, Leighton decided that was enough of a safety net.
Lobster Rolls, Fortunes Rocks and Biddeford City Council
Leighton's first days in Biddeford were considerably more romantic than what came later.
After closing on the house, she picked up a lobster roll and headed to Fortunes Rocks Beach to watch the sunset. Back home, she played her “Bambi playlist,” filled with ABBA, Earth, Wind & Fire, Stevie and other music that reminded her of her sister. For a while, she treated Maine almost like an extended vacation. She remembers stopping for coffee and buying two lobster rolls in the morning because she still hadn't decided whether she preferred butter or mayonnaise.
“I was living the dream,” she said.
Then came the reality of owning a 1952 house in Maine. There were yards, equipment, driveways and eventually winter to figure out. There was also a much bigger question. How does somebody make friends in their 40s when they move somewhere they don't know anybody?
Leighton found one answer in an unlikely place. She poured herself a glass of wine and watched Biddeford City Council meetings. “I own a home here now,” she remembered thinking. “I should know what's going on in my city.”
She subscribed to the Biddeford Beat, started learning about local events and began showing up. Then she saw that Biddeford was forming a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee.
The work aligned with racial-and health-equity efforts she had already been involved with in New York.
Leighton applied.
How Flo Leighton Found Her Place in Biddeford
Four years later, Leighton remains on the committee and has chaired it since 2022. What started as one way to become involved in an unfamiliar city became a doorway into friendships and community.
“Life has really come together in such a crazy beautiful way for me,” she said. “I feel grateful every day.”
Her involvement grew naturally from there. She worked with students, local organizations and community events, helping with efforts that ranged from Juneteenth celebrations to neighborhood cleanups.
Some of it was much quieter.
Following the killing of Johan Guerrero in Biddeford this summer, Leighton opened several pro bono spaces in her practice for members of the immigrant community who might need mental-health support. Guerrero was approximately her son's age, and Leighton regularly passes the intersection where he was killed.
“We can do hard things,” Leighton said. “It's just much easier to do hard things when you're doing them with other people that genuinely care.”
Her response also says something about the way Leighton practices professionally. “It's the least that I can do,” Leighton said. “But if everybody did that, we would live in a really different place.”
That philosophy has roots much deeper than Biddeford.
At 17, people made room for her when she needed it.
Now she makes room for somebody else.
Flo Leighton's Approach to Mental Health
Leighton has worked in mental health since 2006 and has been a psychiatric nurse practitioner for a decade. Her independent practice includes therapy and prescribing, but medication isn't automatically where she begins.
She wants to understand the person first.
“Before anybody gets anything, I want to know, how are you sleeping? What did you eat in the last 24 hours? Okay, how's your hydration going? When's the last time you moved your body?” she said.
Leighton asks about sunlight, movement, relationships, hobbies and environmental stress. She also wants patients to understand that depression and anxiety don't necessarily stay inside someone's thoughts.
“Sometimes people's depression and anxiety actually shows up as physical symptoms,” she said.
For all the complexity of mental-health care, Leighton holds one belief that is remarkably straightforward.
“I think everybody should have a therapist,” she said. “We all have stuff that we need to talk through that requires a neutral, non-judgmental human.”
Some of Leighton's relationships with patients now span years. She has watched people she began treating as teenagers move into their mid-20s, bearing witness to marriages, divorces, births, deaths and all the ordinary upheaval in between.
“I love, love, love what I do,” she said.
That work has also given her a front-row seat to problems that don't necessarily require medication at all.
Flo Leighton Says to Find Your Way to Help
Agency also shapes the advice Leighton gives people who want to contribute to their community but worry they're not doing enough.
“The not enough can sometimes be an anxious thought,” she said. “I also feel sometimes like I don't do enough. And then my therapist tells me, ‘Girl, you're doing too much. Slow down.’”
Leighton once had a tendency to say yes to everything. With time, she has become more protective of where she spends her energy.
Along the way, Leighton also found something else she hadn't brought with her to Maine: a partner. She married Gregg Shapiro in February 2026, adding a husband—and a bonus daughter, Sabrina and granddaughter, Luna—to the life she had been building in Biddeford.
Her husband is a useful example.
Gregg enjoys canvassing, talking with neighbors about ballot issues and voting, and volunteering at hazardous-waste collection days. Leighton laughs at how genuinely happy he is putting on a safety vest and helping direct traffic.
“He looks like a kid who still believes in Santa on Christmas because that's what lights him up,” she said.
Flo's places are different.
“What lights me up is going into the classroom for the Black Student Union, a multicultural student union, and talking to the kids and looking at their excitement,” she said. “What lights me up is talking to other people about mental health or professional practice as a healthcare provider, specifically in nursing.”
Her advice isn't to copy what someone else is doing.
“You just pick your spots because there are so many ways that people can help,” she said.
Leighton has picked hers.
She helped make Biddeford's early Juneteenth celebrations possible. She advocated for Black Student Union students to be able to wear cords at graduation, has participated in community cleanup efforts and has found ways to make her professional knowledge available outside the walls of her practice.
Biddeford Volunteer of the Year and Maine Black Excellence
Recognition eventually followed.
In 2024, Leighton was named the City of Biddeford's Volunteer of the Year. In August 2026, she received a Maine Black Excellence Award, an honor she said is given to only nine people each year.
For someone who arrived in Biddeford in 2021 knowing almost nobody, the speed of it all still surprises her.
“I think about myself as somebody in the background doing my thing,” she said. “But obviously me being in the background doing my thing has created a lasting impact in ways that makes me feel really good.”
She paused when considering how much had happened in only a few years. “It's crazy,” Leighton said. “It's surreal. Sometimes I have to pinch myself.”
There is more she wants to build, particularly around teaching.
But there is also something she has learned not to build again.
Leaving Biddeford Better Than She Found It
Leighton isn't finished teaching.
She misses the classroom and continues to supervise psychiatric nurse practitioners and other mental-health professionals. She can imagine developing continuing-education opportunities for nurses and nurse practitioners, particularly around creating more culturally responsive mental-health care.
The ambition is still there. What has changed is Leighton's willingness to disappear inside it. The woman who once carried three jobs while caring for hundreds of patients and more than a hundred students has a new requirement for whatever comes next.
“I need my schedule to be mine,” she said.
Some of that schedule now belongs simply to the life she has built in Maine. Leighton is a devoted Portland Hearts of Pine fan and a member of the Dirigo Union supporters group, where she can be found in Section 119 among the flags, smoke and noise.
“It's a big part of my story here in Maine,” she said.
It's one more piece of a life that would have been difficult to imagine when Leighton arrived in Biddeford alone in 2021, wondering how people made friends in their 40s. Five years later, she has a husband, a bonus daughter and granddaughter, friends, neighbors and community work she believes in—and enough municipal involvement with Gregg that she jokes about creating “Biddeford City Hall: The Musical.”
Long before any of it, Leighton's mother gave her a rule for moving through the world. “No matter where you go or whoever you encounter, leave it better than you found it.”
Leighton has carried that lesson into nearly every corner of her life. People made room for her when she was 17 and needed help; she has spent much of her adulthood finding ways to make room for someone else.
She did it when she couldn't find the cancer support she needed and helped create it. She does it with patients, students and young clinicians, and she has done it in Biddeford by looking around at a city she barely knew and asking where she might be useful.
But Biddeford gave something to Leighton first.
It gave her somewhere to grieve her sister Bambi and somewhere to begin again. It gave her an old house to figure out, beaches where she could find peace, people who became friends and eventually a community in which she no longer had to wonder how someone in their 40s makes them.
The remarkable part is that Biddeford was never the plan.
Leighton's relationship with Maine began years earlier with a $59 plane ticket, a winter beach and a feeling that she would return. When she finally decided to move north, she searched dozens of houses across southern Maine without knowing where she would land.
On the final afternoon of that search, a house appeared in a city that hadn't even been on her list. Leighton thought she was choosing Biddeford, but maybe Biddeford had been calling her all along—before she even knew its name.
Many thanks to Flo Leighton for her time on Monday, September 14, 2026 in Biddeford, Maine.
Visit Flo's website at : https://www.healwellness.org
Flo Leighton is Issue #49. BrickTides.com celebrates the people, places and businesses that give York County, Maine, its character — through original photography, thoughtful interviews and local storytelling. Each week, we sit down with someone from our community, listen to their story and share a little more about the people who live, work, create and build things here. If you enjoy discovering the stories happening around you, subscribe to Brick+Tides and come along for the next one.