It’s hard to convince people these days that one lonely person can budge the vast stone wheel of apathy. The truth, though, is the same as it ever was: One pair of willing hands might inspire thousands or millions to push. That’s the way the world is changed: hand by hand. One person who found the courage to push the wheel is Ruth Coker Burks. Now a grandmother living a quiet life in Rogers, in the mid-1980s Burks took it as a calling to care for people with AIDS at the dawn of the epidemic, when survival from diagnosis to death was sometimes measured in weeks. For about a decade, between 1984 and the mid-1990s and before better HIV drugs and more enlightened medical care for AIDS patients effectively rendered her obsolete, Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She had no medical training, but she took them to their appointments, picked up their medications, helped them fill out forms for assistance, and talked them through their despair. Sometimes she paid for their cremations. She buried over three dozen of them with her own two hands, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.
This story begins with somehow understanding the reality that families can refuse to acknowledge their own blood, that mothers can refuse to visit (and later bury) their children, simply because of who they are and how they loved. We live in far more tolerant times than was true during the height of the AIDS crisis in the mid- to late-’80s…but only just. We recoil at the belief that HIV/AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuality, but 30 years ago that, as disgusting now as it was then, was wide-spread and prevalent. One member of my own family told me in all seriousness that he believed HIV/AIDS to be God visiting divine punishment against those who dared contravene His laws. As appalled as I was then that my own flesh and blood could hold an opinion so bigoted, self-righteous, and heartless, it was not at all unusual. Collectively, we were scared; AIDS was a terrible disease with no cure that seemed to be attacking those many already considered sinful and depraved: gay males. Assuming it to be the wages of sin gave many a frame of reference allowing them to make something resembling sense of an unbelievably terrifying disease.
Because of the stigma then attached to such a horrible and incurable disease, thousands of American men (and a growing number of women) died alone. If they hadn’t been rejected by their families and shunned by their churches due to their lifestyle, an AIDS diagnosis- then a virtually guaranteed death sentence- invariably caused family and loved ones to vanish out of fear and loathing. They feared the stigma that came with an AIDS diagnosis, and they couldn’t bear the ostracism and social alienation that accompanied it. Looking back at that period is to examine a time in which compassion too often lost out to panic, prejudice, and virulent homophobia.
Arkansas- even now not a state known for Progressive values- was in the mid- to late-’80s a place unwilling and ill-equipped to deal with scores of dying gay men. Deeply Conservative, Arkansas was not a place where an AIDS diagnosis would be met with caring and compassion. The default reaction was too often rejection and ostracism, leaving those facing a lingering, horrific death to face their fate alone.
The story of that time has been told repeatedly- movies like Philadelphia and Dallas Buyer’s Club, for instance. Less well known are the stories of the real heroes of the AIDS crisis, angels like Ruth Coker Burks.
“And so I went back in and he looked up at me and he said, ‘Oh, Mama, I knew you’d come.’ I stayed with him for 13 hours while he took his last breath. I called his mother and I told her that he had died and she said, ‘I’m not burying him.’ So I had him cremated and I brought him home.”
“And you buried them,” Wineland says, “when they died, when no one else would.”
“I’ve buried over 40 people in my family’s cemetery, because their families didn’t want them,” Coker Burks says.
“You were the only person that we could call,” Wineland says. “There wasn’t a doctor. There wasn’t a nurse. There wasn’t anyone. It was just you. … You loved them more than their families could. You loved them more than their church could. Now it almost looks like looking back into another world.”
“It really does,” Coker Burks says. “It was such a horrible time. But we’re still standing.”
Burks is 56 now, but she was a 25-year-old mother when she went to visit a friend in the hospital. She first came into contact with AIDS when she noticed a hospital door with a “big, red bag” draped over it. She noticed that nurses were extremely nervous and reluctant to go into the room to check on the patient. It was 1984, before Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AID) had even been named. At that time, the new, barely understood, and terrifying disease was known as Gay-related immune deficiency (GRID). The disease seemed most prevalent among gay men, and so it was assumed that it had something to do with their deviant lifestyle (and thus was easy to define it as God’s divine punishment for sexual wickedness and sin).
Long story short, she went into the room with the red door and found a patient dying of AIDS who wanted nothing more than to see his mother.
“I walked out and [the nurses] said, ‘You didn’t go in that room, did you?’ ” Burks recalled. “I said, ‘Well, yeah. He wants his mother.’ They laughed. They said, ‘Honey, his mother’s not coming. He’s been here six weeks. Nobody’s coming. Nobody’s been here, and nobody’s coming.’ “
Unwilling to take no for an answer, Burks wrangled a number for the young man’s mother out of one of the nurses, then called. She was only able to speak for a moment before the woman on the line hung up on her.
“I called her back,” Burks said. “I said, ‘If you hang up on me again, I will put your son’s obituary in your hometown newspaper and I will list his cause of death.’ Then I had her attention.”
Her son was a sinner, the woman told Burks. She didn’t know what was wrong with him and didn’t care. She wouldn’t come, as he was already dead to her as far as she was concerned. She said she wouldn’t even claim his body when he died. It was a hymn Burks would hear again and again over the next decade: sure judgment and yawning hellfire, abandonment on a platter of scripture. Burks estimates she worked with more than a thousand people dying of AIDS over the course of the years. Of those, she said, only a handful of families didn’t turn their backs on their loved ones. Whether that was because of religious conviction or fear of the virus, Burks still doesn’t know.
Burks went back into the room with the red door, uncertain how to tell the man that her mother not only wasn’t coming but that to her he was already dead. Gripped by hallucinations, the man mistook Burke for his mother, so she sat at his bedside for 13 hours and held his hand until he took his last breath. Then, because the man’s mother refused to acknowledge her son, much less claim the body, Burks took on that task as well.
When Burks was a girl, she said, her mother got in a final, epic row with Burks’ uncle. To make sure he and his branch of the family tree would never lie in the same dirt as the rest of them, Burks said, her mother quietly bought every available grave space in the cemetery: 262 plots. They visited the cemetery most Sundays after church when she was young, Burks said, and her mother would often sarcastically remark on her holdings, looking out over the cemetery and telling her daughter: “Someday, all of this is going to be yours.”
“I always wondered what I was going to do with a cemetery,” she said. “Who knew there’d come a time when people didn’t want to bury their children?”
Files Cemetery is where Burks buried the ashes of the man she’d seen die, after a second call to his mother confirmed she wanted nothing to do with him, even in death. “No one wanted him,” she said, “and I told him in those long 13 hours that I would take him to my beautiful little cemetery, where my daddy and grandparents were buried, and they would watch out over him.”
Burks had to contract with a funeral home in Pine Bluff for the cremation. It was the closest funeral home she could find that would even touch the body. She said she paid for the cremation out of her savings.
The ashes were returned to her in a cardboard box. She went to a friend at Dryden Pottery in Hot Springs, who gave her a chipped cookie jar for an urn. Then she went to Files Cemetery and used a pair of posthole diggers to excavate a hole in the middle of her father’s grave.
Over the next few years, Burks buried more than 40 men who died from AIDS. All had been rejected and abandoned by their families. None had any hope of leaving life surrounded by those who cared about them…but Ruth Coker Burks took on the responsibility of caring for and eventually burying those whose horrific, agonizing deaths were made worse by the callousness of their families.
Burks never saw herself as a hero. She hasn’t talked much about what she did until recently. In her mind, she was simply doing what she felt called by God to do. I may not believe in God, but I can wholeheartedly get behind those who do and who commit to living their lives in a manner reflective of the teachings of their faith. Burks understood Christian concepts like love, tolerance, and acceptance aren’t always easy to live. The manner in which she chose to live those teachings stands in stark contrast to the many self-professed Christians who wanted nothing to do with friends and family members dying of AIDS. Fear of a little-understood pathogen is understandable…but rejecting loved ones who had what was then perceived as a “gay disease” is not reflective of someone grounded in Christian values.
As the years went by, Burks saw her role expand from being present for dying AIDS patients and then burying them to becoming a de facto pharmacy to helping some fill out their own death certificates. The stories- and there’s no lack of them- are as horrific as they are heart-rending. Men died fully aware that they’d been rejected and repudiated by the people they should have been able to count on for support- their own families.
Before she’s gone, she said, she’d like to see a memorial erected in the cemetery. Something to tell people the story. A plaque. A stone. A listing of the names of the unremembered dead that lie there.
“Someday,” she said, “I’d love to get a monument that says: This is what happened. In 1984, it started. They just kept coming and coming. And they knew they would be remembered, loved and taken care of, and that someone would say a kind word over them when they died.”
If I as an atheist and non-Catholic could nominate someone for sainthood, it would be Ruth Coker Burks, who through her compassion, kindness, and commitment reflected the teachings of the Jesus Christ she believed in like few in this world ever have or ever will. She did it quietly and without being desirous of fame or renown. She did it because it was what she felt called by God to do…and without her, the AIDS patients she cared for very likely would have died utterly alone. Her contribution may have been a drop in the bucket when the scope and breadth of the AIDS epidemic are considered, but it was huge to those whose lives she touched.
When I think of heroism, Ruth Coker Burks is a living, breathing textbook definition of the concept. She did what she felt was the right thing for the right reasons and in so doing touched many lives with her kindness and compassion. If that doesn’t meet the criteria for sainthood, I can’t imagine what would. It’s my belief that she’s as eminently worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize as any of those whose work I saw commemorated at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway.
When I read Burks’ story, I found myself wondering, “Could I have done what she did?” I honestly don’t have an answer for that, because we lived in a very different world in the mid-’80s. I’m the same age as Burks; while my essential morality hasn’t changed over the years, the strength of my character most certainly has. It was a terrifying time, and many- FAR too many- reacted our of fear, prejudice, and self-preservation. Looking back, I suspect many might wish they’d done things differently, but the past is immutable and unchangeable. All of us must live with- and hopefully learn from- our mistakes and regrets.
The comments made by readers of the Arkansas Times story about Burks shows what a different world we live in 30 years after the fact. Increased knowledge of HIV/AIDS and improved treatment options mean the disease is no longer necessarily an automatic death sentence. It means people need no longer live in fear of a “gay disease” whose stigma was too much for many to bear. That’s a very good thing- made possible in part by Burks’ kindness, selfless, and boundless compassion.
Ruth Coker Burks may not have changed the world, but she certainly had a positive impact on her little corner of it. That may be the best many of us can hope for…and it’s certainly no small accomplishment. I’m just glad I learned about her kindness and selflessness, and my hope is that many others will come to recognize and honor her for her courage, selflessness, and the good things she’s done.
Whatever one might call it, and whatever Burks may feel about it, what she did defines everything the word “heroic” should embody.
