‘Pat my head, and I’ll bite you.’

In 2002, Kathy Conour and Diana Braun drove to Columbus, Ohio, to talk to Academy Award-nominated director Alice Elliott. Conour, who had cerebral palsy, and Braun, who had Down syndrome, had lived together since 1970 and wanted Elliott to help them show other people with disabilities that they could be just as independent.

Conour continued to e-mail Elliott, who was initially hesitant to accept another project, until she agreed. She came to Springfield the next year to begin filming the pair in their Springfield home. Five years later, Body & Soul: Diana and Kathy started screening at film festivals worldwide and has since won 11 awards.

“I thought it was so creative and symbiotic,” Elliott says. “That really struck me as important for a film. You can have this kind of creative friendship that will be mutually beneficial.”

Conour and Braun had been inseparable for 39 years, until on Sept. 19, Conour died of a heart attack at age 66 at Memorial Medical Center. It was one month before their film made its local PBS debut.

Conour was born on March 22, 1943 and grew up on Bates Avenue in Springfield. She was an only child; her mother was a first grade teacher and her father was an insurance agent. At age 9, Conour’s parents enrolled her in the Illinois Children’s Hospital School in Chicago — a move that her cousin Mary Caroline Erickson says was the first step to her independence.

“They worked with Kathy over the years to develop her capabilities,” Erickson says, “because as an adult, she wanted to live independently.”

Conour’s disability never kept her from experiencing life. In the 1960s, Conour’s family traveled the world. They drove as far south as the Yucatan Peninsula and as far north as Alaska in an Airstream trailer. She later visited such countries as Italy and Israel.

In 1970, she met Braun at a sheltered workshop in Ottawa, Ill., and the pair instantly connected. Neither one of them wanted to live with their parents or in a nursing home like many other people with disabilities at the time.

“She pointed like this to me, and said, ‘That’s the person I want,’” Braun says. “She was the person I wanted. We knew we were the right team.”

They started out with foster families in Ottawa and in Kankakee, but in 1978 found their first apartment. They eventually returned to Springfield in 1990 after an operation left Conour paralyzed from the neck down.

Conour had always been non-verbal, but in earlier years could communicate by pointing to letters and phrases on a special board attached to her wheelchair. After the operation, she lost her limited mobility but could still communicate through Braun.

“No one could understand her but me,” Braun says. “I knew what she was saying by eye contact and listening. She would look at me, and I’d look at her. That’s how we do it.”

With the help of a Pathfinder electronic communication device, Conour graduated in 1993 with a bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in business administration from Olivet Nazarene College. In 1998, Conour and Braun hired a contractor to build their own house.

The pair became activists for disability rights, serving on boards for such organizations as United Cerebral Palsy of Illinois, the Illinois Council on Developmental Disabilities and the Illinois Center for Independent Living. In 2005, they became the first people with disabilities to win an Illinois Human Rights Award.

In the past few years, they traveled to places like California and New York to promote Body & Soul: Diana & Kathy. The film was important to Conour, Braun says, because she wanted people with disabilities to know they didn’t have to be put away or ignored.

“Kathy wanted to see how far this film will go,” Braun says. “We’re trying to teach them, so they don’t have to hide their disability. They can go to the movies, go out to eat, try to go on a train or travel around the world like we do.”

People in Conour’s life remember her sense of humor and defiance. Pete Roberts, executive director of the Springfield Center for Independent Living, gives the perfect example: she had a bumper sticker on her wheelchair that said, “Pat my head, and I’ll bite you.”

“Kathy’s message was don’t treat me that way,” Roberts says. “Don’t pat me on the head. I’m equal to you. She and Diana both lived their life that way. They expected equality from people, they demanded it from people.”

Her cousin, George Conour, calls her a visionary who was capable of getting what she wanted: a movie that would “allow people who were undertaking the same struggles as they were to learn how to live independently.”

Braun, who’s 58, continues to travel to promote their film, recently talking to more than 3,000 people with disabilities at a conference in Albany, N.Y., about becoming independent. It’s hard without Conour, she says, but it’s what she would have wanted.

— Amanda Robert