Anita Wadhwani

awadhwani@tennessean.com

On one of the first Christmases that Pat Cothran can remember spending with her little brother, Tim, she bought him a music box, the kind popular in the 1960s.

She would wind it up for him over and over, listening to the tinny sound of the nursery rhyme, "Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle" set to music while Tim smiled. Music was one of the only things that made Tim smile. He was born severely disabled, blind, unable to speak and paralyzed from the waist down. Even at 2 years old, it was clear Tim would never get much better.

Another Christmas memory: the time she bought a music box that played, "This old man, he played one. He played knick-knack on my thumb." The pair spent hours listening to that little box.

Pat was just 6 when Tim was born in 1964. She was the oldest child in a family that seemed at times to barely hold itself together.

Three years after Tim was born, her mother gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. The family buried the newborn boy two days after he was born. Pat's mother never seemed to recover, never seemed to have it in her to mother any of her children, especially Tim, Pat said. Her father tried to take care of the home and the kids, but he had a full-time job.

By the time Pat was 8, she was Tim's full-time caretaker. She changed his diapers, fed him and crushed medicine between two spoons to coax it into his mouth.

She held Tim's hands to stop him from hitting his head from the pain after surgery to relieve fluid building up in his brain. She played him music on her little transistor radio.

She called him "Timmy" and told him "Sissy loves you" while she stroked his arm. In a family that had seemed to fall apart, the brother and sister clung to each other.

A different time

But the 1960s were a different era than today when it comes to children with disabilities. Many parents, often at the urging of medical professionals, sent children with autism, Down syndrome or intellectual disabilities to live in large institutions at young ages.

And one day, when Tim was about 4 years old, that's what Pat's parents decided to do with Tim. Without warning, Pat saw a church van pull up to the house. A man carried Tim and his little wooden wheelchair into the van and drove off.

"Back in those days, people like my brother were cast-outs," Pat said, weeping at the memory of that day as a 10-year-old girl running after the van and screaming that she would try harder to take care of her brother. "People were ashamed of them, and my mother was one of them."

For a few years, before Pat's father developed cataracts and was unable to drive, the family made an occasional trip to visit Tim at Clover Bottom once a year, a painful trip that made her brother's departure from her life even more unbearable. He recognized her voice. But then she would leave.

As Pat grew older, she asked her parents about visiting Tim again. She asked whether he was still at Clover Bottom, a Nashville institution built in the 1920s for children and adults with intellectual disabilities. At one point, she started asking whether her brother was even alive. Pat said she never got a straight answer. Her mother seemed to want everyone to just forget about him.

Pat left home at 16, married and started her own family by the time she was 17. Her father died. She didn't speak much with her mother. And it was only after her mother died — 46 years after the day Tim left home — that she got her answer.

It was in a trash bag filled with old papers and pictures about to be hauled away before her mother's home and possessions were auctioned.

It was an impulse that took her to her mother's home in Fayetteville for one last look before it was sold. Then looking at the trash bag near the front door, "something told me to look in it, and I did," she said.

Inside were pictures of Tim as a baby. And there were letters, mounds of letters, addressed to her mother. They were all from Clover Bottom. Some of them were recent.

"Timmy was there all along," Pat said. "He was alive. That's how I found my brother, rummaging through a garbage bag."

She took the papers home and waited a day before she picked up the phone and called the number on the letters. Her hands were shaking as she dialed. And when someone at Clover Bottom told her, "yes, Tim's still here," she wept.

"It unnerved me so bad, because I was just thinking if I'd known he was still there, I could have been checking on him, being with him," she said. "I thought, 'I wish I had tried harder.' "

'He remembered me'

Pat has no idea how Tim spent the last 46 Christmases inside Clover Bottom or the rest of his days since he was a 4-year-old boy driven away in that church van.

But on the day she drove from her home in Columbia to Clover Bottom in Nashville to be reunited with Tim, she remembers every detail. Pat was terrified. She was afraid she would throw up on the ride there. She didn't know what to expect.

But then she saw Tim. Now a 50-year-old man, balding, in a wheelchair, still unable to speak or control his limbs, but still recognizably Timmy. She walked over to him, rubbed his arm and said, "Timmy, this is Sissy. It's Sissy."

"He looked straight at me, like 'I know that voice,' " she said. "After all these years, he remembered me. And I'm going to make sure he is never forgotten again."

The records Pat got when she asked a judge to appoint her as Tim's legal conservator show no one in the family visited him for decades. The records, reviewed by The Tennessean, also showed Tim was neglected while at he was in Clover Bottom, suffering multiple broken bones.

In the months since she found her brother, Pat has found him a small home in Dickson where two nurses provide round-the-clock care. He has his own recliner and family pictures on the wall. Pat's 9-year-old grandson, Kibionte Cothran, bought him a stuffed lion from the Disney movie the "Lion King" because, he said, "Grandma, Tim is like your lion king." Pat visits him as often as she can.

And for the first time in more than 40 years, Pat, now 56, will spend Christmas with her brother Tim. He still loves music, Pat said. This year, she bought him a CD of his favorite country artists, George Straight and Reba McEntire, Pat said they will listen to the music over and over just like they did on Christmases past.

Reach Anita Wadhwani at 615-259-8092 or on Twitter @AnitaWadhwani.