“I remembered how absolutely terrified I was at the beginning,” said Susan Jewett, 76, who first proposed the mentoring idea to Penn Memory after her husband’s death in 2020.

Her pitch: “Maybe I could be useful to someone who is earlier in the process.”

Mentoring can benefit both parties, said Justin McBride, a senior administrator at Duet: Partners in Health and Aging, which began a similar program in Phoenix in 2016. “We hear all the time that supporting another person in need gives mentors a sense of purpose,” he said. “It helps them make sense of their own journey.”

Read more in the New York Times.