Source: The Melbourne Herald Sun [Alan Howe]

THERE are saints in our suburbs leading lives the fates might have chosen for any of us.

I met one last week, her life of anonymous virtue inadvertently revealed to me by her daughter.

The girl silently slid her wheelchair alongside us as we ate in a small restaurant, possibly attracted by the company of the children with us.

Her mother, who runs the restaurant, rushed over to apologise. Apologise? She was bravely in business making ends meet while caring for a young teenager with severe, incurable cerebral palsy.

In every corner of our city there are parents doing the same - managing their lives and those of their children with disabilities, often adults, who cannot care for themselves.

Overwhelmingly, they are loving parents who would never think to utter the word "burden" when talking of their home life.

And as a community, we shamefully lean on them like parasites, dishing out a bit of care here and there so the parents keep their costly offspring at home and out of the community housing we refuse to build or properly fund.

We have little time for those with intellectual disabilities. And while we boast of budgets in the black, the equally dark scenario of ageing parents leaving behind kids who are loved only by them seems not to bother us.

"We are a culture that prizes sport and fitness. The community doesn't want to know about disability," says Kevin Stone, who heads the Victorian Advocacy League for Individuals with Disability.

"These kids remind us of our fallibility, our vulnerability."

Moments before we met in his spartan Fitzroy office Stone was wrestling with the implications of a family in crisis.

They had adopted a disabled boy, having rescued him from one of the institutions in which we once hid them.

But the parents had developed their own serious health problems and, combined with the confrontational behaviour of their son, had hit the wall.

They were about to "relinquish" his care. That is, deliver him to the Department of Human Services.

It's a desperate last resort, but I am surprised it does not happen more often.

A decade ago, Bendigo pensioners Wilf and Fay Alcock so feared for the future of their severely disabled son Rodney that they considered his mercy killing the only way out when it got to the point they could no longer care for him.

"If I knew I was going to die, I'd take Rodney with me," Mr Alcock said, his wife weeping beside him.

They loved Rodney, they still do, but it preys on their minds what will happen to the loving, but helpless man he has become when they are no longer here.

"Where would the poor little devil go?" Mr Alcock asked then of the boy they have lovingly cared for over half a century, almost without a break.

Nine years on, little has changed in the Alcocks' lives and Rodney receives some respite care, but is mostly looked after by his mum and dad, both closing in on 80.

About one in five Victorians waiting for supported accommodation are cared for by family members over 75.

It is best for us, apparently, to string out these low-cost relationships with their parents and squeeze as much from them as we can.

Full-time care with accommodation, support and day programs would run at about $80,000 a year.

The Alcocks, and almost 3000 families across Victoria like them, save us tens of millions of dollars annually.

It frustrates Stone. "If these (disabled) people are supported to achieve their potential they can contribute beyond belief to this community," he says.

"And not just spiritually and socially, but financially. If we make the investment it will pay off."

Back at the restaurant I went over to pay the bill. The owner tried to apologise to us again.

We made our way out. And down the stairs.

Stairs! And you instantly knew exactly how that girl had come up them.

Copyright News Limited – used with permission