Florence opened the door and invited me into her apartment. She pushed her walker to her chair by the window. Her knitting bag sat next to the chair and a knitted and faded afghan was draped over the back.  I spun her walker around and sat on the cushioned seat, facing her. She had called me because her daughter, to whom she had given power of attorney, had moved her into this assisted living apartment, put her home on the market, and told her that she would be in control of the money generated from the home sale. This was happening too fast for Florence. She trusted her daughter and knew she needed help. Still, wasn’t it just yesterday that she was sitting in that same chair in her own home, knitting, and listening to the rain hit the roof outside? She missed her home. “It hugged me,” Florence told me.

Elder law challenges my understanding of home. My parents died in the home where they raised four boys. I live with my dog in the big house where my kids grew up, though those kids are grown and gone. Throughout my life, I have been blessed to have a place to return to and catch my breath and get my legs under me and then go out again. Many of my clients face losing their home because they continue to fall there, or they have food in the refrigerator and it is rotten, or they have cats and the cats have multiplied and turned the house into a litter box, or my clients themselves have turned the house into a litter box. Their kids or their neighbors or Adult Protective Services investigators confront my clients with these stark pictures and heinous smells and urge them to move to where there is more support and to where they can be safe and healthy. Move? my clients think. But this is home.

The law says that my clients don’t have to move if they understand the risks of remaining in their home. If they see the rotten food and the twenty cats and understand that when they fall it might be a long time before someone arrives to help them get up, and still want to remain in their home, they have the right to do that. However, if, due to dementia or some other condition, my clients lack insight to the risks posed by living at home, the court may take away from my clients the right to determine where they live and give it to a guardian.

The guardian is going to choose the safe place to live, and the court is going to support the guardian’s choice, if my client objects. I have argued for my clients that safety should not be the only goal of guardianship. If safety sacrifices quality of life, then perhaps we should be willing to live with risk. This is a dangerous premise for a guardian or a court to accept, and most often they do not.

Sometimes a guardian will contest the premise that a move from home to a care facility sacrifices quality of life. If a person is social but isolated and unsupported at home, a move to a care facility might increase quality of life simply through the connection of the person to a community. I have had clients who experienced this and became healthier and happier after moving from their home. In many cases, I represent the guardian, and I raise these points.

Still, though, I wonder. One of the routes home from my office takes me past Ellen’s house. She is long gone, but I remember meeting her there after the court appointed me to represent her. She was in her 90s, living alone in her home, and predators in the area had become aware of her, scamming her out of money. Her home had stairs and she had fallen a couple of times, and remained on the ground for too long. Adult Protective Services had asked a professional guardian to petition to become Ellen’s guardian. The petition made clear that the guardian would move Ellen to a care facility and sell her house. Ellen objected.

A social services worker greeted me at Ellen’s door. I sat down in the front room and waited until Ellen emerged from a stairwell, carrying a big basket of laundry. I got up and walked over to her and looked down the steep steps that she had just ascended. I tried to take the basket from her but she refused. She put the basket down and it seemed like the basket was half her height. She was tiny, her hands gnarled with arthritis, her back stooped. We sat down together in the front room, facing the street. It was warm and I could tell she was where she often sat, next to the picture of her husband who died long ago. She had lived there all of her life, gone up and down those stairs with laundry all the while. What was the problem?

The problem was, I thought, that one of these days, someone is going to find you dead at the bottom of those stairs. An attorney once asked me, as I fought his client’s petition for guardianship, if I was willing to live with the consequences if we prevailed. I think of Ellen at the bottom of those stairs. I think of her home hugging her. I don’t know.