{"id":686,"date":"2019-03-06T08:59:33","date_gmt":"2019-03-06T08:59:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.firstlighthomecare.com\/home-healthcare-salem\/?p=645"},"modified":"2026-02-02T15:02:29","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T15:02:29","slug":"dealing-want-go-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.firstlighthomecare.com\/home-healthcare-salem\/2019\/03\/06\/dealing-want-go-home\/","title":{"rendered":"When A Loved One Says \u2018I Want to Go Home\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Sometimes,

Sometimes, the “home” people ask for isn’t the one they moved from last year; it’s the one they grew up in.<\/p><\/div>\n

I sat down with a resident at a memory care facility recently, and, within seconds, she asked me if I\u2019d take her home. For me, a stranger, I could ask the question, \u201cWhere do you live?\u201d and distract her with questions about her home, but distraction doesn\u2019t come as easily for family members, who often feel sad, frustrated, and even guilty when the repeated theme of \u201cgoing home\u201d comes up.<\/p>\n

Going home and getting out of here are common themes if you love someone with dementia. As family members we try to reassure by saying things like, \u201cThis is your home now,\u201d or \u201cYou don\u2019t live there anymore,\u201d but often these reassurances have the opposite effect.<\/p>\n

Imagine if you woke up tomorrow in a home you vaguely recognize but know is not yours. You might see a few possessions you remember, but you know that the important stuff\u2014your memories, the people you love most (your parents, your children as you remember them, your pets) are still somewhere else, in that home you can remember but no longer go to. Would you feel better if someone said, \u201cThis is your home now; don\u2019t worry about it\u201d?<\/p>\n

Deidre Smith-Horton, a licensed clinical social worker for North Shore Physicians Group, reminds families that the \u201chome\u201d their loved one is asking for is often a childhood home\u2014not the one he just moved from or the one his children grew up in. Supporting loved ones through their sadness, Smith-Horton says, is more important than rationalizing or trying to reason through their emotions. This is something Smith and her team at Union Hospital\u2019s Senior Adult Care Unit help families through.<\/p>\n

When Dad asks for home, it\u2019s more than physical walls he\u2019s asking for. It does no good to reassure him that what he\u2019s saying is irrational or irrelevant (\u201cYou ARE home.\u201d \u201cWe sold your home.\u201d \u201cYou haven\u2019t lived there for years.\u201d). It\u2019s better to focus on his anxiety and what\u2019s making him feel that way: \u201cWhy do you want to go home? What\u2019s there?\u201d Rather than trying to brush off the comment with a \u201cThis is your home,\u201d spend some time talking with him about that home he remembers. \u201cThat was a great house, wasn\u2019t it?\u201d \u201cRemind me, how many bedrooms did it have?\u201d<\/p>\n

I worked with a wonderful woman once who had just moved to an assisted living. Every time her family visited, she\u2019d cry and say she wanted to go home. And so the family took her home. And everyday she was at home, she\u2019d cry and say she wanted to go home.<\/p>\n

The point here is that often, although loved ones with dementia want to go home, what they\u2019re looking for goes deeper than that\u2014they want the feeling they get from home\u2014calm, peacefulness, safety, protection\u2014or they want their childhood home or they want something all together different. It\u2019s up to us as family members to support our loved one in her sadness and find ways to help her through it, regardless of the frustration, impatience, sadness, and guilt we may ourselves feel. It\u2019s not easy to do, especially if you\u2019re hearing, \u201cI want to go home\u201d repeatedly every day, but supporting your loved one through it might make her want to go home less.<\/p>\n

Molly Rowe owns FirstLight Home Care with her husband, Steve Rowe, and lives in Swampscott with their two sons. FirstLight provides non-medical in-home care to adults in Swampscott, Marblehead, and all over the north shore. For more information and help caring for your loved ones in the comfort of their own homes, please visit FirstLight\u2019s website at <\/em>www.northshore.firstlighthomecare.com<\/em><\/a> or contact Molly at <\/em>781-691-5755\/mrowe@firstlighthomecare.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I sat down with a resident at a memory care facility recently, and, within seconds, she asked me if I\u2019d take her home. For me, a stranger, I could ask the question, \u201cWhere do you live?\u201d and distract her with questions about her home, but distraction doesn\u2019t come as easily…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":648,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,14,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alzheimers","category-caring-for-aging-parents","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstlighthomecare.com\/home-healthcare-salem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstlighthomecare.com\/home-healthcare-salem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstlighthomecare.com\/home-healthcare-salem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstlighthomecare.com\/home-healthcare-salem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstlighthomecare.com\/home-healthcare-salem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstlighthomecare.com\/home-healthcare-salem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstlighthomecare.com\/home-healthcare-salem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstlighthomecare.com\/home-healthcare-salem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstlighthomecare.com\/home-healthcare-salem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstlighthomecare.com\/home-healthcare-salem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}