Emily Jane Crawford (left), a pre-med student at Arizona State University, visits Bud Addison (right) and provides his wife, Mary, with a much needed break.
Emily Jane Crawford (left), a pre-med student at Arizona State University, visits Bud Addison (right) and provides his wife, Mary, with a much needed break.
KJZZ
April 15, 2026
By Kathy Ritchie
Former first lady Rosalynn Carter once said there are four kinds of people in the world: “Those who have been caregivers, those who are currently caregivers, those who will be caregivers and those who will need caregivers."
But there really might be five: caregivers who help other caregivers.
Bud Addison is sitting at the kitchen table in his West Phoenix home. Bud is flipping through a workbook filled with word searches.
Bud has Alzheimer’s disease. Next to him is Emily Jane Crawford, a pre-med student at Arizona State University.
Crawford is part of a new collaboration between Hospice of the Valley and ASU called RISE, as in Respite in Student Engagement.
It’s a paid gig for Crawford — at $20 an hour — and a life-saver for Mary Addison, Bud’s wife of 30 years.
“It’s very hard because you have a person that, you know, what your husband's supposed to be like and he is deteriorating quite fast,” she says.
And Mary needs help. For Bud, Alzheimer’s is more than just memory loss. It affects nearly every part of his life.
“It's hard for me to get him to eat regular food. He loves ice cream, so he can go through four-and-a-half gallons of ice cream and three loves bread a week, and he can't drive," she said.
Evenings can be especially heartbreaking. Bud will tell Mary he wants to go back to his childhood home.
“His mother's passed away, his father's passed away and his brother's passed away — and he doesn't quite understand that,” she says, sadly. “It's like, ‘I want to go home; my mom's there, they're gonna come and get me.’”
Mary wants to keep Bud home as long as possible. But she also needs a break.
“I find myself sometimes getting — I want to say, ‘I don't like you anymore,’ because that's, you know. He just runs me into the ground sometimes,” she says.
Dr. Gillian Hamilton is the medical director of Hospice of the Valley’s supportive care for dementia program.
“She put it very well,” says Hamilton referring to Mary’s earlier comment about her husband running her into the ground.
RISE is Hamilton’s brainchild.
“I think you know the data: that caregivers often die before the person living with dementia due to the incredible stress of that task," Hamilton said.
And family and friends often fall away, leaving that caregiver mostly on their own.
So a program like this one is filling a much needed gap: caregivers are getting respite and students are getting real-life dementia experience.
Nour Hassan is Hamilton’s student and the RISE student coordinator. Her job is, in part, to play matchmaker.
“Right now,” I think we're at 31 official matches between families and students,” says Hassan.
And like any good match, it’s about chemistry — finding someone who connects with both the person living with dementia and their care-partner. For Bud and Mary, that someone is Emily.
“When I say Emily's coming, he's very happy about that.,” says Mary. “Like I said, he goes to the door and greets her. And they immediately start their activities and he just loves that.”
There are clear boundaries. Emily doesn’t provide personal care, like bathing or toileting.
And the money part is handled directly between the student and the family, explains Hassan.
“Our goal is just companionship and caregiver respite — giving them the chance to step away while their person has socialization.”
At least until Emily graduates next spring, which Mary knows is inevitable
“Well, when Emily graduates, hopefully there's someone else that's going to follow in her steps.”
Like any new program, RISE’s future may come down to the data, which Hassan is working on as part of her honors thesis.
“I've taken an early peek at the results. And one of the questions I ask is, ‘could you see yourself doing this in the future?’ And it's so dramatically ‘yes’ from the students,” she says.
Which she says is really cool, because there aren’t enough dementia providers in the state.
Dr. Hamilton says there are six- to nine-month waiting lists for neurologists who specialize in dementia, and there are only about 115 practicing geriatricians in the entire state.
“There obviously aren't enough geriatricians, but we don't need that. We need to educate our primary care providers about how to diagnose and manage dementia,” says Hamilton. “It's not that complicated, but everybody's afraid to do it.”
So Hamilton is leading a separate grant to do that.
And later this year, Hassan will defend her thesis — and hopefully demonstrate that a program like this one is worth modeling elsewhere.
For Mary Addison, though, the results are clear: A few hours of help, a familiar face at the door and just enough time to catch her breath so she can keep showing up for Bud.
For more information on this program, visit dementiacampus.org/care-at-home/rise-respite-care/. If you are a student or family member interested in the program, please email rise@hov.org.
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