I helped take care of my father, who had Alzheimer’s.

Before I moved in with him, I happened to read “Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency” by Eva Feder Kittay, a philosophy professor who had a child with severe to profound retardation.
          Kittay had examined liberal political theory that imagined citizens as free and independent, and she had seen flaws in regard to women. Male philosophers saw themselves as independent even when others were tending their homes and raising their children. She writes: 

The independent individual is always a fictive creation of those men sufficiently privileged to shift the concern for dependence onto others. 

Kittay faults disability advocates who place too much emphasis on the need for independence. This can create an unreal expectation in parents and the person with disabilities; not everyone can become independent.

some relationships go beyond mutuality and interdependence. Some people are dependent

we must fully accept and recognize that