Richard Lui’s Caregiving Journey:

The Road to Sky Blossom

Richard Lui is a man with many jobs: NBC journalist and news anchor, author, documentary filmmaker, and family caregiver. Lui’s caregiving journey began with his father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis eight years ago. Lui recalled in an interview for the Stanford Center on Longevity podcast “When I’m 64” that “there was no way I was going to not fight for [my father] as he began this Alzheimer’s journey”, but he was quickly faced with the challenge of providing care for someone living in California while he himself was based in New York. After weighing his options, Lui reached out to his boss and asked if he could cut his hours back to work part time. “I expected her to say, ‘Sorry, kiddo, we love you. Square peg, round hole. Journalists work eight days a week’ (and we do). But instead, she said, ‘I'm taking care of my mother in Florida’. And we're both sitting there in an office at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.” Lui’s boss worked with him to create a part-time schedule where he could fulfill his caregiving duties, and travel regularly back and forth to the west coast, which he did until the pandemic hit.

Over the years, Lui was frequently buttonholed by colleagues who wanted to express their support for his efforts and to share their own caregiving experiences. It left him deeply moved by the connections and also led him to understand that caregiving experiences and challenges are widely shared, if not widely spoken about. As a result, Lui decided to use his skills and contacts from his career as a journalist to shed a new light on family caregiving. There are currently five and a half million military caregivers in the United states, and five million caregivers who are children under the age of 18. Lui decided that “to tell the macro, you sometimes go to the micro” so he recruited a team of award-winning journalists, producers, and filmmakers to work on a documentary that followed five military caregivers aged 11-26 across the United States. He called the film “Sky Blossom: Diaries of the Next Greatest Generation”, after the nickname for paratroopers who drop to the aid of ground troops during combat. Lui chose the film’s subtitle because he believes that this documentary will help older generations to stop oversimplifying the stories of younger generations, and members of the younger generations will be able to see themselves in the film’s protagonists.

Lui found himself in awe of the young caregivers spotlighted in the film, not the least of which because of their willingness to sit down with a film crew and be open about their experiences. “What I really was surprised about and wowed by was their honesty and their forthrightness in our conversations, because who is this guy? You know, who is this Richard guy coming to talk to me and why?... [It’s hard to] think of a more uncomfortable situation for an 11 year old like Rihanna Alvarado, who's in Long Beach, California, and is on the spectrum than to be sitting there talking to me- it's a lot of weirdness, but they all opened up.”

It was important to Lui to showcase the common themes, like financial struggles, felt by so many caregivers. “I wanted to show the story of economic insecurity- I lived through economic insecurity and it is so common for the caregiving community to go through that”. Sky Blossom follows Jenna Ploof, who became head of her household at 21, as she works full-time at Panera while balancing college classes and her caregiving duties. While her story is unique, it will surely resonate with anyone who has struggled to maintain finances while also being a full-time caregiver for a family member.

Sky Blossom also focuses on the love that the young caregivers have for their family members- 11 year old Rihanna affectionately calls her father “Super Dad” and 16 year old Deryn proudly describes her father, who was injured by an IED blast while serving overseas, as “invincible”. Lui notes that this deep love is something that all family caregivers can relate to, as they answer the question “‘why would you do this?’ with ‘Well, why wouldn’t I do this?’”.

Perhaps the most important thing for Lui during the course of making the film was the sense that he had to guard the stories of the young caregivers. As a caregiver himself, he knew what it meant for the young caregivers to share their stories with him, and he promised them that “as a fellow caregiver, a person that is just like you, regardless of your age, I am going to make sure it's done right. I'm not going to give it to somebody else. I'm going to be there to the last frame to get it right”.

Sky Blossom is available on DVD and streaming platforms on May 25, and in theaters on May 26.