Sisters turned a Fairhaven estate into a unique home for elderly and dying patients

FAIRHAVEN — Anita Regan isn’t one to turn anyone away. Strangers become friends. That’s the way she and her siblings grew up.

Regan and her sister, Christina, the oldest of six siblings, started Regan’s Creative Health and Homecare, providing 24-hour, overnight care to older people and people at end of life. Anita, the youngest of the siblings, explains the inspiration behind the name.

“The creative part is that we meet people where they are, and we started with homecare in people’s homes,” she said. “As time progressed, we started helping people go from their homes to assisted livings, to memory care, to end of life.”

Losing Christina to stage 4 metastatic breast cancer in November, Anita put a pause on taking in new clients so she could mourn her loss, but she is ready to welcome new friends, or clients, into the fold with the support of her sister Lisa.

“I say it’s not just my home, but as soon as you come in, it’s your home, too,” Anita said. “We eat with people. They’re not sitting at the table being served, but if they need help eating, we help you. Everybody is included.”

At WestView, the small family-owned, private pay home care agency located at 1 Main St., the Regans call the people who stay with them housemates.

Their lives as caretakers

Anita is a caretaker. She was 12 when she and her sisters started taking care of their grandmother after she had a stroke. Their family would often be called to babysit or shovel snow or help out in some other way.

“It was a natural progression for us to go from just doing it on our own for our own families to us going into hospitality,” she said.

She worked with Christina at a restaurant she started called Mattapoisett Takeout for about 10 years, but when middle sister Lisa decided to move to Hawaii to work in hospitality, her sisters followed.

When they decided to return to Massachusetts, Christina decided she wanted to be a nurse, while Anita became a certified nursing assistant.

“We started off helping people in our neighborhood and then in our families and then people outside of our family started to ask for help just through word of mouth, so that’s when we became an LLC,” she said.

In a multi-generational home

She calls their residence a multi-generational home where everyone from her grand niece to her aunts and uncles can stay along with their housemates.

“It’s our home, but we have four rooms, and we hold space for people who can’t really live alone,” she said.

A book by a Boston surgeon who wrote about different ways to help elders and people with dementia got Christina’s attention, including input from a doctor who worked in nursing homes and assisted livings whose approach was to bring life into patient’s homes.

They adopted this approach, Anita said, realizing they had always done that in their family among the older generations by having shared living space.

Why settle in Fairhaven

When they started looking for property, she started thinking of her grandmother’s side of the family and how they moved to the SouthCoast after a hurricane in the late 1940s and how they would summer in the area. One of her aunts had also lived in New Bedford.

An open house was being held at WestView when she saw the house and immediately told Christina they had found their new home.

Originally from Newton, they moved into the house in 2019, and in 2020, the first housemate moved in. Lisa said it’s a blessing to have met the people who have stayed with them.

The Regans always had a lot of people in their house with six siblings. Anitia's father, who taught her the trade skills she used to work on the house, was the oldest of 16, and her grandfather was the oldest of seven. Her parents also took in foster children.

“I’m able to live communally because it’s something I’ve done that my whole life as one of six, and my sister and I were a really good team, and we just made it all happen,” she said.

The 'nursing home abolitionists'

Anita said she and Christina would call themselves “nursing home abolitionists” because they wanted to move away from the idea that you could move four people into a room and they would all get the attention they would need. An aunt who worked at a nursing home once told her she would get reprimanded for taking too much time with a patient.

“It’s just not who we are,” she said. “People deserve to have dignity, respect and time. We’re not a cog in the wheel here. We try to be really creative and meet people where they are and understand what their needs are.”

It’s a community. Everyone in the house is invited to sit down for breakfast or a cup of tea, and no one has to be confined to their rooms, Anita said.

“We’ve had people on respite for a knee replacement, we have a handful of people that we help in their homes, and when their primary care person goes on vacation, that person comes here on vacation,” she said.

Support for hospice care

While there is no one in-house currently, giving her time to mourn Christina, she’s getting calls again and expects to be ready in June to welcome people in. She’s a strong supporter of hospice care.

“I believe in hospice,” she said. “Our core beliefs are we meet you where you are, we’re here to support your decision, you’re calling the shots, we don’t do anything unless you ask us to, and I mean that from a medical standpoint. We do everything from soup to nuts.”

However, when it comes to the family, hospice or VNA driving the plan, she said they follow their lead and offer support where needed.

“I do get attached to them, but that’s OK,” she said. “I say that I won’t have it any other way mostly because we can support so much, and people shouldn’t be alone when they die.”

Recently, she read about how to change your home to age in place, and they started making those changes, such as removing thresholds and adding grab bars and other tweaks to help assist people. There are no throw rugs that can be trip hazards.

She looks forward to having a full house again and offering the kind of one-on-one level of care for people at the end of life. She’s determined that everyone who stays there is not left alone.

“We make sure that they get that quality of care, and it’s mostly because that’s what we would do for our family,” she said. “We always say, 'What would I want?'”

During her rehabilitation, one of the housemates cooked dinner for everyone. She loved to cook, and she would need to start doing things for herself again, Anita said.

“Our needs are different, so we just try to support people where their needs are,” she said.

How to reach out

Much of their business comes through word of mouth. She said she’s selective about who she works with because they need to be like-minded people who like company because it’s not for everybody.

In order to move in, their clients sign both a housemate agreement and a person care agreement. At that moment, it becomes their home, she said.

Anita said by creating relationships with people while providing home care, by the time they need help or are at end of life, they have bonded, and she can help the person passing as well as supporting their family.

“It is really sad, but it’s so beautiful at the same time to be able to be that person for those people,” she said.

She has several per-diem part-time nurses who help her with the care plan and intakes, but most people she’s working with now have a VNA to see them, and she liaisons with their families to support them 24 hours a day.

She also plans on offering workshops and educational opportunities.

.Standard-Times staff writer Kathryn Gallerani can be reached at kgallerani@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter: @kgallreporter. Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Standard-Times today.

This article originally appeared on Standard-Times: Regan's Creative Health and Homecare puts a spin on assisted living