Coming Home

There are many platitudes about home like, “home sweet home,” “no place like home,” and “home is where the heart is.” Undoubtedly, you can think of others as well as what the word “home” triggers in you. Home is a core human need. We know that home is our safe place. It is where we live our lives and build memories. It’s a physical space that we know and an emotional place that we carry. How many of us have taken our loved ones on a drive by of our childhood homes? How many can summon up memories of all the homes we’ve lived in throughout our lives?

When individuals reach a point in their life where they need care and support, many of them move into residential settings, whether independent living, assisted living, nursing home or memory care. While these new places may be rooms within a building, they become, and are, the individual’s home with all the expectations and opportunities that home can provide.

If you are assisting your loved ones to make a transition, keeping thoughts of home in your mind can make change and adjustment easier on every level. Familiar objects, family photos, reminders of who they are and the life they have lived, are all meaningful. These items can also help any professional staff who are involved, giving them insights into your loved one, finding places to build connections.

And when moving is necessary, from a long-term home to a new setting, from one setting to another, it is important to recognize and respect that every move is not just a change in location. It is giving up one home as you move to another, it is saying goodbye to a place that has become familiar and “mine” to enter a place that is altogether different.

Often we move an elder because their needs have changed or because the organization or the family feels a change is better for that individual. Of course, these moves are likely the right thing to do. But that does not mean that we should forget that they are leaving a home and coming into a new home. They need time, as we need time, to say farewell to what they leave behind, the place, the people around them, the familiarity and they need time, as we need time, to embrace a new home.

Home means something different to each of us. No two people will hear that word and conjure up the same image. Remembering that this is also true for our elders, remembering that the home in which they reside, regardless of size or location, is still their home is important for both a successful transition and a more positive outcome.