“I couldn’t wrap my head around it.”
That’s what Luke Rivera thought when as a 14-year-old kid in summer school, he received a phone call that his mother, at just 44 years old, suffered an ischemic stroke, leaving half her body paralyzed.
“It caught me very, very off guard,” he said. “I didn’t really understand what was going on.”
Luke and his three siblings experienced the family caretaker dynamics flip.
The physical and emotional effects were devastating, not just for Dana Rivera, but for the whole family. It was time for the child, while they were still children, to take care of the parent.
Read the rest on the Hockey Humanitarian Award website.
