Going Home Again?

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 family in his thirties, living in Colorado and New Mexico. Sometime after the 1910 census, he returned to Illinois where he had some relatives still living (mostly cousins but no siblings or nieces or nephews) and eventually died. Why he returned I don’t know, but his children were scattered throughout New Mexico and the western United States.