Returned Home in their Old Age

Is it possible that relative you can’t find “returned home” in their old age? A relative of mine left Illinois in the 1870s with his young family when he was in his thirties, living in Colorado and New Mexico. Sometime after the 1910 census, he returned to Illinois where he had some relatives (mostly cousins) and eventually died. Why he returned I don’t know, but his children were scattered throughout New Mexico and the western United States at the time of his death. Another uncle of mine lived throughout the United States while in the military and fifteen years after his retirement from the service returned to the county where he grew up to spend the rest of his life, even though his children lived elsewhere.