The Women Who Cared for Gay Men Dying of AIDS

Between 1984 and the mid-1990s, before better HIV drugs effectively rendered her obsolete,

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Ruth Coker Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She buried more than three dozen of them herself, 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.

It started in 1984, in a hospital hallway. Ruth Coker Burks was 25 and a young mother when she went to University Hospital in Little Rock, Ark., to help care for a friend who had cancer. Her friend eventually went through five surgeries, Burks said, so she spent a lot of time that year parked in hospitals. That’s where she was the day she noticed the door, one with “a big, red bag” over it. It was a patient’s room. “I would watch the nurses draw straws to see who would go in and check on him. It’d be: ‘Best two out of three,’ and then they’d say, ‘Can we draw again?’ ”

She knew what it probably was, even though it was early enough in the epidemic for the disease to be called GRID — gay-related immune deficiency — instead of AIDS. She had a gay cousin in Hawaii and had asked him about the stories of a gay plague after seeing a report on the news. He’d told her, “That’s just the leather guys in San Francisco. It’s not us. Don’t worry.” Still, in her concern for him, she’d read everything she could find about the disease over the previous months, hoping he was right.

Whether because of curiosity or — as she believes today — some higher power moving her, Burks eventually disregarded the warnings on the red door and snuck into the room. In the bed was a skeletal young man, wasted away to less than 100 pounds. He told her he wanted to see his mother before he died. 

“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.’”

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 able to speak for only 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 curse 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 1,000 people dying of AIDS over the years. Of those, she said, only a handful of families didn’t turn their backs on their loved ones.

Burks hung up the phone, trying to decide what she should tell the dying man. “I went back in his room,” she said, “and when I walked in, he said, ‘Oh, momma. I knew you’d come,’ and then he lifted his hand. And what was I going to do? So I took his hand. I said, ‘I’m here, honey. I’m here.’”

Burks pulled a chair to his bedside, talked to him, and held his hand. 

She bathed his face with a cloth and told him she was there. “I stayed with him for 13 hours while he took his last breaths on Earth,” she said.

Since at least the late 1880s, Burks’s kin have been buried in Files Cemetery, a half-acre of red dirt on top of a hill in Hot Springs, Ark. When Burks was a girl, she said, her mother got in a final, epic row with Burks’s 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, some 70 miles away, for the cremation. It was the closest funeral home she could find that would even touch the body. 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.

“I knew that Daddy would love that about me,” she said, “and I knew that I would be able to find him if I ever needed to find him.” She put the urn in the hole and covered it over. She prayed over the grave, and it was done.

Over the next few years, as she became one of the go-to people in the state when it came to caring for those dying with AIDS, Burks would bury more than 40 people in chipped cookie jars in Files Cemetery. Most of them were gay men whose families would not even claim their ashes.

“My daughter would go with me,” Burks said.

“She had a little spade, and I had posthole diggers. I’d dig the hole, and she would help me. I’d bury them, and we’d have a do-it-yourself funeral. I couldn’t get a priest or a preacher. No one would even say anything over their graves.”

She believes the number is 43, but she isn’t sure. Somewhere in her attic, in a box, among the dozens of yellowed day planners she calls her Books of the Dead filled with the appointments, setbacks, and medications of people 30 years gone, there is a list of names.

Burks always made a last effort to reach out to families before she put the urns in the ground. “I tried every time,” she said. “They hung up on me. They cussed me out. They prayed like I was a demon on the phone and they had to get me off — prayed while they were on the phone. Just crazy. Just ridiculous.”

After she cared for the dying man at University Hospital, people started calling Burks, asking for her help. “They just started coming,” she said. “Word got out that there was this kind of wacko woman in Hot Springs who wasn’t afraid. They would tell them, ‘Just go to her. Don’t come to me. Here’s the name and number. Go.’…I was their hospice. Their gay friends were their hospice. Their companions were their hospice.”

Before long, she was getting referrals from rural hospitals all over the state. Financing her work through donations and sometimes out of her own pocket, she’d take patients to their appointments, help them get assistance when they could no longer work, help them get their medicines, and try to cheer them up when the depression was dark as a pit. She said many pharmacies wouldn’t handle prescriptions for AIDS drugs like AZT, and there was fear among even those who would. 

She soon stockpiled what she called an “underground pharmacy” in her house. “I didn’t have any narcotics, but I had AZT, I had antibiotics,” she said. “People would die and leave me all of their medicines. I kept it because somebody else might not have any.”

Burks said the financial help given to patients — from burial expenses to medications to rent for those unable to work — couldn’t have happened without the support of the gay clubs around the state, particularly Little Rock’s Discovery. “They would twirl up a drag show on Saturday night and here’d come the money,” she said. “That’s how we’d buy medicine, that’s how we’d pay rent. If it hadn’t been for the drag queens, I don’t know what we would have done.”

Burks’s stories from that time border on nightmarish,

with her watching one person after another waste away before her eyes. She would sometimes go to three funerals a day in the early years, including the funerals of many people she’d befriended while they fought the disease. Many of her memories seem to have blurred together into a kind of terrible shade. Others are told with perfect, minute clarity.

There was the man whose family insisted he be baptized in a creek in October, three days before he died, to wash away the sin of being gay; whose mother pressed a spoonful of oatmeal to his lips, pleading, “Roger, eat. Please eat, Roger. Please, please, please,” until Burks gently took the spoon and bowl from her; who died at 6 foot 6 and 75 pounds; whose aunts came to his parents’ house after the funeral in plastic suits and yellow gloves to double-bag his clothes and scrub everything, even the ceiling fan, with bleach.

She recalled the odd sensation of sitting with dying people while they filled out their own death certificates, because Burks knew she wouldn’t be able to call on their families for the required information. “We’d sit and fill it out together,” she said. “Can you imagine filling out your death certificate before you die? But I didn’t have that information. I wouldn’t have their mother’s maiden name or this, that, or the other. So I’d get a pizza and we’d have pizza and fill out the death certificate.”

Billy is the one who hit her hardest and the one she remembers most clearly of all. He was one of the youngest she ever cared for, a female impersonator in his early 20s. He was beautiful, she said, perfect and fine-boned. She still has one of Billy’s dresses in her closet up in the city of Rogers: a tiny, flame-red designer number, intricate as an orchid. 

As Billy’s health declined, Burks accompanied him to the mall in Little Rock as he quit his job at a store there. Afterward, she said, he wept, Burks holding the frail young man as shoppers streamed around them. “He broke down just sobbing in the middle of the mall,” she said. “I just stood there and held him until he quit sobbing. People were looking and pointing and all that, but I couldn’t care less.”

Once, a few weeks before Billy died — he weighed only 55 pounds, the lightest she ever saw, light as a feather, so light that she was able to lift his body from the bed with just her forearms —  Burks had taken Billy to an appointment in Little Rock. Afterward, they were driving around aimlessly, trying to get his spirits up. She often felt like crying in those days, she said, but she couldn’t let herself. She had to be strong for them.

“He was so depressed. It was horrible,” she said. “We were driving by the zoo, and somebody was riding an elephant. He goes, ‘You know, I’ve never ridden an elephant.’ I said, ‘Well, we’ll fix that.’” And she turned the car around. Somewhere, in the boxes that hold all her terrible memories, there’s a picture of the two of them up on the back of the elephant, Ruth Coker Burks in her heels and dress, Billy with a rare smile.

When it was too much, she said, she’d go fishing.

And it wasn’t all terrible. While Burks got to see the worst of people, she said, she was also privileged to see people at their best, caring for their partners and friends with selflessness, dignity, and grace. She said that’s why she’s been so happy to see gay marriage legalized all over the country.

“I watched these men take care of their companions and watch them die,” she said. “I’ve seen them go in and hold them up in the shower. They would hold them while I washed them. They would carry them back to the bed. We would dry them off and put lotion on them. They did that until the very end, knowing that they were going to be that person before long. Now, you tell me that’s not love and devotion? I don’t know a lot of straight people who would do that.”

Ruth Coker Burks had a stroke five years ago, early enough in her life that she can’t help but believe that the stress of the bad old days had something to do with it. After the stroke, she had to relearn everything: to talk, to feed herself, to read and write. It’s probably a miracle she’s not buried in Files Cemetery herself.

After better drugs, education, understanding, and treatment made her work obsolete, she moved to Florida for several years, where she worked as a funeral director and a fishing guide. When Bill Clinton was elected president, she served as a White House consultant on AIDS education.

In 2013, she went to bat for three foster children who were removed from the elementary school at nearby Pea Ridge after administrators heard that one of them might be HIV-positive. Burks said she couldn’t believe she was still dealing with the same knee-jerk fears in the 21st century.

The work she and others did in the 1980s and 1990s has mostly been forgotten,

partly because so many of those she knew back then have died. She’s not the only one who did that work, but she’s one of the few who survived. And so she has become the keeper of memory.

Before she’s gone, she said, she’d like to see a memorial erected in Files Cemetery. Something to tell people the story. A plaque. A stone. A listing of the names of the unremembered dead who 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.” 

*This story originally appeared in the Arkansas Times.

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All Her Sons: The Cemetery Angel

When the AIDS crisis hit in the 1980s, Ruth Coker Burks – who’d inherited 262 plots in a family cemetery in Hot Springs, Arkansas – became a mother of sorts to countless sons, many abandoned by families and churches because they were suffering from what was then called “the gay cancer” – and in many cases she gave them a final resting place. Seth Doane reports on the woman who has been called “The Cemetery Angel,” who gave – and received – so many precious gifts. (This report, originally broadcast December 1, 2019, received an Excellence in Journalism Award from NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists.)

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Fighting Fear and Stigma To Care for AIDS Patients

Mama Ruth
A Childhood Friend of President Bill Clinton, Ruth Coker Burks Was Tapped by a Higher Power for a Vital Mission.

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Ruth Coker Burks had forty children, all of them boys. Well, I’ll explain.

Let’s travel back to 1984, when an AIDS diagnosis was considered a death sentence. Ruth, now fifty-seven and a grandmother of three, was twenty-five, divorced, and the mother of a small daughter, Allison. Her matriarchal journey took a new route when she visited a friend, who was battling cancer, at a hospital in Hot Springs, Arkansas, her hometown. On her way to the room, she noticed a patient’s door draped with a red bag. She was curious but was in a hurry to see her friend. The next day, she passed the door again, observing nurses draw straws to see who would go in. Ruth had an idea what was going on.

Due to curiosity or chosen by a higher power, as she believes today, Ruth surreptitiously entered. She saw an emaciated young man. Once they started chatting, he asked for his mother.

When she exited the room, the nurses squealed, “You didn’t go into that room, did you?!” She responded, “Yes. He wants to see his mother.” Amused, the nurses replied, “Honey, his mother’s not coming. He’s been here six weeks and nobody’s coming. Nobody’s been here and nobody’s coming.”

Ruth didn’t accept their answer. Persistence led her to track down the phone number of the man’s mom. When Ruth phoned, the mother hung up. Ruth called back and warned, “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.” She had the woman’s attention.

Spewing fire and brimstone, the woman grumbled that her son was a sinner and that in her eyes he was already dead. She added that she was not going to claim the body.

Ruth felt sad and defeated. What would she tell the woman’s son? As soon as she entered his room, he said, “Oh, mama, I knew you’d come.” He lifted his head. Ruth grasped his hand and retorted, “I’m here, honey. I’m here.”

It was probably the first time he had ever been touched with ungloved human hands since he had been in the hospital.

Ruth stayed with the man thirteen hours and was with him when he took his final breath. Why wasn’t she afraid? Ruth simply says, “I never thought about it.”

Ruth called the man’s mother again to see if she wanted his body. She didn’t. Ruth had the body taken to a funeral home and she paid for the cremation. When the ashes were delivered to her in a cardboard box, she emptied the man’s ashes into a cracked cookie jar that she got at a friend’s pottery shop. She then went to Files Cemetery, where her family has been buried since the 1880s, dug a hole in her father’s grave, placed the urn into the hole, and covered it with dirt. She prayed over the grave. Ruth knew her father would appreciate what she did. She buried about fifty souls this way. “I was burying people my age, but they were my children.” (In all, through the years, Ruth administered care to over a thousand people.)

The next few years, this scene would play out again and again, as Ruth became the caregiver to those dying of AIDS-related causes. Even Ruth’s little daughter would accompany her to the cemetery and help dig a grave alongside Ruth. No priest or preacher would acquiesce to officiate. Ruth buried nearly fifty men like this, those who died alone, whose family disowned them. Sometimes, making a last ditch effort to contact the families, they would cuss her out or call her the devil.

“Word went around that there was this wacko woman in Hot Springs who wasn’t afraid,” Ruth exclaims about others’ perceptions of her. She’d get referrals from hospitals in other cities to care for these men. Ultimately, she became more involved and would drive them to their doctor’s appointments, to pick up their meds, and even network and rally to help them receive financial support as well. Their expenses sometimes were covered by private donations she received, and sometimes she used her savings. Eventually, gay clubs began fundraising to help her cause. One of those clubs was Discovery, located in Little Rock, and on Saturday night, the drag queens who worked there would put on shows to raise money. In 1988, the owner, Norman Jones, founded the nonprofit, Helping People With AIDS, with which Ruth was strongly affiliated.

Caring for these men with opportunistic infections was an infernal abyss for Ruth, as she witnessed their demise, one by one. She even helped to fill out their death certificates, since their families had abandoned them. “We’d sit there by the bed, have pizza, and fill it out.” Ruth would also become their confidant, confessor, and mood-lifter, helping them out of isolation and depression.

One time, Ruth recalls, the mother of one of her “boys” called to ask, “How long before he dies? He’s ruined our lives and we need to get on with ours. We don’t want people to know he has AIDS.”

Another patient, Billy, a drag performer who was in his early twenties, was in despair one day after Ruth drove him to an appointment in Little Rock. She joyrided around to lift his spirits. They passed the zoo where someone was riding an elephant. He softly uttered, “I’ve never ridden an elephant….” Ruth replied, “We’ll fix that!” And in one of her many memory boxes there’s a photograph of them both proudly straddling the elephant. Ruth sports a top, skirt, and heels, and Billy just beams. (Eventually, a couple of weeks before he died, he had withered away to fifty-five pounds.)

According to Ruth, her patients lived two years longer than the national average, and the NIH (National Institutes of Health) and CDC would send her patients. They couldn’t understand what she was doing. Her “secret”? Love and touch.

Ruth Coker Burks’s response at the genesis of the AIDS crisis was undeniably valiant and plucky—most certainly trailblazing. She approached her mission with vigor, tenacity, and compassion, a lone warrior in battle, who besides playing mother was a nurse, priest, friend, consultant, gravedigger, masseuse, and chauffer.

Today Ruth is as vibrant as ever, still lending her support to those affected by the epidemic, despite suffering a stroke several years ago and recently experiencing blood clots in her lungs. On December 1, she is being presented with the Thom Weyand Unsung Hero Award by the National AIDS Memorial Grove in San Francisco.

During one of President Bill Clinton’s terms, Ruth served as a White House consultant on AIDS education. She moved to Florida where she was a funeral director for a few years, and then returned to Arkansas and settled in Rogers to be closer to her daughter and grandchildren.

In 2014, Dave Isay, who founded StoryCorps interviewed Ruth and it was aired on NPR. In the interview she spoke about her yearning to keep history alive at Files Cemetery, and of the turmoil people went through at the beginning of the epidemic, when it was then known as GRID (gay-related immune deficiency), expressing her desire to erect a memorial to honor “her boys.” Travis Dubreuil, who heard the broadcast and lives in New York, decided to create a GoFundMe campaign to help Ruth’s dream come true. Funds are currently being raised to not only purchase a monument, but renovate the dilapidated cemetery, as well.

Ruth’s birth name is Frances Ruth Coker Burks, after her paternal grandmother. Once her story gets turned into a film, Ruth said she could see Amy Schumer playing her. “I feel that she has the moxie to pull it off. She has a sense of humor which you have to have if you’re going to do what I did.” Emma Stone, too, she adds.

Dann Dulin: Out of all the misery and horror that you experienced, what one positive thing came out of it for you?
Ruth Coker Burks: I witnessed pure strength and courage. I witnessed and felt pure love. I saw faith.

How did you deal with the sadness?
I’d go fishing. At times I did feel like crying, but I held up for them.

Where did you get the guts to care for these sick, dying people, at a time when many thought that AIDS could be easily communicable?
From God.

Being right in the trenches from the onset of the epidemic, what surprises you the most about the current state of affairs about this disease?
That we are right back where we started from, except it isn’t the death sentence it once was. The young people aren’t getting the education that they desperately need. The older generation is still suffering in silence. Many haven’t had relationships in over thirty years. They have had so much loss in their lives they can’t take anymore. Then there are the long-term survivors who need our help in so many ways.

What did you learn about yourself?
I learned that I had more strength than I ever thought I had. I also realized that I was brave for my guys, and that stress will wreck your body. It catches up with you sooner than later.

What do you think happens after we die?
We all have different perceptions about the afterlife. I always tried to give my guys back what they believed. People always ask me about my guys and I tell them that they all got right with their God before they died. I never apostatized. For me, I hope to go to Heaven, rest for a while by the beach, with all of my guys and have a few cocktails, until I get another assignment.

What made you reach out? Where did this empathy come from?
How could I not?! I feel people’s suffering, animals too. Sometimes it is hard to not reach out to everyone and to mind my own business. I had a rough childhood. My mom had TB and was in the hospital for a long time. My daddy took care of me during that time until he died. I was five. My mother wasn’t equipped to be a mother, so I was on my own from an early age. I learned to just treat people like I wished someone had treated me.

What was the number one thing that pissed you off during the time you cared for your “boys”?
The [lack of] response from the churches and the government. I know for a fact that the clergy all said in their sermons to love one another, to take care of the sick and the needy, and to help those who are less fortunate. There was the perfect opportunity to put all of those teachings to action with AIDS…but the churches were the first to slam their doors shut.

Unfortunately, stigma still surfaces today. How do we rail against it?
I was denied a job that was specifically designed for me a couple of years ago because I went on TV and advocated for three elementary-age, disabled, foster children who the superintendent of their school district suspended because he had heard that someone in the family had AIDS. This was in 2014! I had been promised the job but hadn’t accepted it yet. When I went to fill out my paperwork I was told, “The job is no longer available.” I was blackballed from all of the funeral homes and cemeteries in my area. I loved my job and I was very good at it. It broke my heart.

Tell me, what are your plans for Files Cemetery?
We’re raising money to make the cemetery into a beautiful garden, a place to meditate and contemplate. It has become a pilgrimage site where people from all around the country go to pay their respects. I had a landscape architect contact me and offer to design the renovation and make it something that the men would be proud of. Any other money raised will be used to buy plants, statues, and benches to beautify it.

Lovely! What kind of garden do you envision?
I want to plant old-style flowers and shrubs that don’t need much watering. The flowers will be jonquils, peonies, camellias, gardenias, and forsythias. You know, the kind that would have been in your grandmother’s yard. These plants I want to flower all year round, so no one will feel lonesome and unloved.

What’s your concept of the monument?
A weeping angel. We will also have a plaque telling the story of what happened from my eyes and the story of my brave men who died, also listing their names.
After I’m gone, no one will take care of it so I want to set up some kind of trust to help keep the place intact.

Who are your heroes in the epidemic?
There are so many….My guys were heroes to me! They were brave beyond anything I had ever seen in my life. They would take their meds up until the day they died, [believing] there was a cure right around the next corner. Hope.

Ruth’s Recipe

Her advice on what needs to be done today

1) GET TESTED!

2) The young people need to take to heart and understand that a generation of brave men and women died so that they could live.

3) We need to remember and take care of the Long Term Survivors. They are the forgotten ones in this pandemic. We need to find them and help them get what they need.

4) Educate yourself and learn to be your own Sexpert! There’s no reason to be shy. Take advantage of the Internet. Men, learn how to wear a condom (https://vimeo.com/204074590); Women, condoms are available for you too (http://www.fc2femalecondom.com); Find out about the prevention drug PrEP. Sex is supposed to be fun.

5) Life is short. Live a remarkable life. Have adventures. Be outrageous.

Ruth Coker Burks is available for speaking engagements. To book her, please contact Toni Y. Long at tlong@tyllaw.com.

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How Ruth Became the Angel of America’s AIDS Crisis

The first time Ruth Coker-Burks saw an AIDS patient, he was near death.

Frail, sunken skin resting on hollow bones, the spark of life dwindling: his name was Jimmy.

All he wanted, in the world, was to speak to his mother. But she wouldn’t come.

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Ruth Coker-Burks – the ‘cemetery angel’

Ruth was a 25-year-old young mother visiting University Hospital in Little Rock to help care for a friend with cancer. This was in 1984.

One day, she noticed a door telling her it was a quarantined room. She saw nurses would draw straws to check on the 100-pound man crying out inside.

She knew what it was, she had read about it. It was then known as GRID – gay-related immune deficiency.

A gay cousin in Hawaii had told her it was just the leather guys in San Francisco, but this was in Arkansas.

Ruth disregarded the warnings on the room, and said hello to the man dying on the hospital bed.

Meeting the first AIDS patient and his mother

‘I only knew him for about 13 or 14 hours,’ she tells Gay Star News.

‘When I met him, he was obviously near death. I went out to call his mother because that’s all in the world he wanted.

‘She wouldn’t come. She wouldn’t even talk to me.

‘I called her and said her son was very near death and wanted to see her before he died.

‘She said, “My son died years ago. I don’t know what you’ve got at the hospital but that’s not my son. Don’t call me back.”

‘So I called her back and said if she hung up on me again I told her I’d put her son’s obituary in the hometown newspaper and I’d list his cause of death.

‘I had her complete attention at that point.’

Pioneer in HIV and AIDS activism

From there, Ruth was a pioneer. Without any medical training, Ruth cared for dying gay and bi men abandoned by families.

She arranged appointments, picked up medication, and counseled them through their grief.

Often she would test friends herself and tell them the results. If they were positive, it was still considered a death sentence.

The AIDS advocate buried over three dozen of these men with her own two hands in the family’s private cemetery.

As an only child, she knew the grounds would never fill its 262 spaces. Across that decade, many of those spaces were used.

‘I did want to give him a proper burial because everyone deserves that,’ she says.

‘Everyone has the dignity of having their own space, saying, “look I was here too”.’

‘If you call this number she will help you…’

More patients kept coming. The hospital told these patients, ‘we don’t deal with you but if you call this number she will help you’.

Ruth dealt with hundreds of men.

‘They all stood out for me. They all did in their own ways,’ she says. ‘Some I don’t remember their names, but I remember their sweet faces.’

Church refused to help Ruth Coker-Burks

Ruth was very religious, but the Methodist church turned its back on her. They would throw away pens she touched and refuse to drink coffee she made.

‘They were horrible. It’s why I’m not religious anymore,’ she says.

‘There wasn’t a church that wanted me because I worked with AIDS patients. They didn’t want me.

‘I thought I was doing what God asked us to do, feed the hungry and take care of the sick and the poor.’

But Ruth doesn’t believe they were frightened of catching the disease, they just hated LGBTI people.

When the church failed her, she found a different kind of divine being to support her.

Getting help from drag queens

‘The first time I saw a drag queen, I thought I was in heaven,’ she says.

‘I thought, “this is the most fascinating thing I have ever seen in my life”. They’re so talented.’

Gay bars got organized and raised funds to support Ruth’s work. Many of the queens that first supported her later came to Ruth as patients.

One of these men was named Billy. He was in his early 20s, a drag queen.

His mother once called Ruth, demanding to know when he was going to die.

‘He’s holding up our lives,’ she said. ‘We don’t want people up here to know [he has AIDS]’.

By the time Billy died, he weighed just 55 pounds.

‘It’s a shame we let so many wonderful magnificent people die’

‘It’s a shame we let so many wonderful magnificent people die,’ she said.

‘Everyone that died of AIDS – so many of them were so talented. The world never got to witness to see how talented they really are.’

When the Center of Disease Control and the National Institute of Health finally decided to do something about HIV and AIDS, they sent people to Ruth as her patients were lasting two years longer than the national average.

‘The only thing they could figure out was that I loved them,’ she said.

‘The human touch was all it took to get them to live.’

In 2014, the Journal of American Medical Association, finally agreed with her.

Ronald Reagan ‘is to blame’ for AIDS crisis

This isn’t just about an sympathetic woman taking care of dying gay men when no one else would. This is about who is to blame.

‘We wouldn’t even have AIDS if it hadn’t been for Ronald Reagan,’ she said.

‘How could the President of the United States not know his constituents are dying of this horrible disease?

‘No one is his entire cabinet. They don’t even mention the word AIDS until years in his term?

‘And then they’re joking about it.’

And it’s true, you can you can still watch video of Reagan’s press secretary and chief of staff laughing about AIDS patients.

Ruth believes if they had treated the disease the same way they did tuberculosis, or the way the US government tackled ebola recently, thousands of lives could have been saved.

Is the US on the brink of another AIDS pandemic?

‘I am afraid that right now we’re at the beginning of an another AIDS pandemic in the United States,’ she said.

‘The way things are going, especially as they’re cutting out medication for HIV.

‘Vice President Pence, he’s from Indiana, and that state has the highest rate of HIV transmissions.’

This is why Ruth is campaigning for sex education in schools.

‘You’ve got a computer and you’ve got that little computer in your hand. You can learn yourself how to put a condom on, how to protect yourself,’ she says in a message to readers.

Importance of sex education

‘Keep your body healthy because it is yours and yours alone. Do the best you can and don’t get caught up in the heat of the moment.’

Ruth now lives a quiet life in Arkansas. She’s a grandmother and is often invited to give speeches at HIV awareness events.

In 2010, she had a stroke. A casual observer would assume she’s fully recovered although she tells us she still has some small issues.

It was thanks to her friends that she got through it.

Remembering them, she said: ‘They all had a unique story that would make any life better.

‘They were so kind and loving and gentle people that the world doesn’t have enough of.

‘We have to take care of people.’

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Meet The “Cemetery Angel”

Meet The “Cemetery Angel” Who Cared For Hundreds Of AIDS Patients When No One Else Would

“I loved them. They were like my children, even though I was burying people my age,” says Ruth Coker Burks.

There was a time, not too long ago, when an HIV diagnosis was a death sentence.

There was no medicine, or even an understanding of how the disease spread, let alone what it was.

In the early 80s, when HIV first hit the U.S., there was just widespread panic, and a growing stigma against homosexual men. And where there wasn’t panic, there was indifference.

Related: Has The AIDS Vaccine Been Found? New Drug Blocks Every Strain Of HIV

Most people with HIV and AIDS were ostracized, treated as less than human—sometimes literally left to die by doctors and nurses unwilling to touch them. At a time when they needed compassion the most, they were met with discrimination and hatred.

Not everyone had this mindset, though.

There were kind souls who saw past the fear and felt compelled to help. One such person was Ruth Coker Burks of Garland County, Arkansas—otherwise known as the “Cemetery Angel.”

In a detailed interview with The Arkansas Times, Burks recalls her first experience with an AIDS patients back in 1984. She was just 25, and visiting a friend with cancer at University Hospital in Little Rock:

I would watch the nurses draw straws to see who would go in and check on [patients]. It’d be: ’Best two out of three,’ and then they’d say, ’Can we draw again?’

Whether because of curiosity or—as she believes today—some higher power moving her, Burks eventually disregarded the warnings on the red door and snuck into the room. In the bed was a skeletal young man, wasted to less than 100 pounds.

He told her he wanted to see his mother before he died.

I walked out and [the nurses] said, ’You didn’t go in that room, did you?’ 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.’

Burks contacted the young man’s mother after managing to get the number from hospital staff, but she refused to see her son—or even claim the body. After his death, though, Burks, saw to it that he was properly buried.

News got out of her efforts, and Burks found herself receiving call after call from patients, or sometimes their families. People who had been turned away by everyone else.

Of the hundreds of patients she helped, Burks says only a handful of families didn’t turn their backs on their loved ones. Some were terrified of the virus, others were convinced they were going to burn in hellfire.

She recalled the mother who called Burks up and demanded to know how much longer it would be before her son died. ” ’I just want to know, when is he going to die?’ ” Burks recalled the woman asking. “’We have to get on with our lives, and he’s holding up our lives. We can’t go on with our lives until he dies. He’s ruined our lives, and we don’t want people up here to know [he has AIDS], so how long do you think he’s going to stay here?’ Like it was a punishment to her.”

There was a lot of fear and misinformation in those days, and Burks has often been asked why she wasn’t afraid, or why she didn’t wear gloves around her patients.

“I have no idea,” she said. “The thought of being afraid never occurred to me until after I was already deep into the AIDS crisis. I just asked God, ’If this is what you want me to do, just please don’t let me or my daughter get it.’ And He didn’t.”

Interestingly, the patients Burks tended to lived two years longer than the national average.

“They would send people from all over the world to the National Institutes of Health, they would send them to the CDC, and they would send them to me,” she said. “They sent them to me so they could see what I was doing that helped them live.”

But there was no magic drug or therapy.

“I think it was because I loved them. They were like my children, even though I was burying people my age.”

The efforts of Burks and those like her have not been forgotten, though so many of those she helped have passed. Now 55, she says her faith fueled her bravery and incomparable strength.

“They were good days,” she said, “because I was blessed with handing these people back to God.”

For more of Ruth Coker Burks’ incredible story click here

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St. Ruth The Cemetery Angel

Ruth Coker Burks, the cemetery angel

• 

• 

In the darkest hour of the AIDS epidemic, Ruth Coker Burks cared for hundreds of people whose families had abandoned them. Courage, love and the 30-year secret of one little graveyard in Hot Springs.

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.

So much of the history of AIDS in America died with the people who lived it. What is left has often been shoved into the cabinet of Times Best Forgotten. Here, though, is a story from those days. It’s a story about what courage can do.

The red door

It started in 1984, in a hospital hallway.

Burks, now 55, was 25 and a young mother when she went to University Hospital in Little Rock to help care for a friend who had cancer. Her friend eventually went through five surgeries, Burks said, so she spent a lot of time that year parked in hospitals. That’s where she was the day she noticed the door, one with “a big, red bag” over it. It was a patient’s room. “I would watch the nurses draw straws to see who would go in and check on him. It’d be: ‘Best two out of three,’ and then they’d say, ‘Can we draw again?’ ”

She knew what it probably was, even though it was early enough in the epidemic for the disease to be called GRID — gay-related immune deficiency — instead of AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome). She had a gay cousin in Hawaii and had asked him about the stories of a gay plague after seeing a report on the news. He’d told her, “That’s just the leather guys in San Francisco. It’s not us. Don’t worry.” Still, in her concern for him, she’d read everything she could find about the disease over the previous months, hoping he was right.

Whether because of curiosity or — as she believes today — some higher power moving her, Burks eventually disregarded the warnings on the red door and snuck into the room. In the bed was a skeletal young man, wasted to less than 100 pounds. He told her he wanted to see his mother before he died.

“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 hung up the phone, trying to decide what she should tell the dying man. “I didn’t know what to tell him other than, ‘Your mom’s not coming. She won’t even answer the phone,’ ” she said. There was nothing to tell him but the truth.

“I went back in his room,” she said, “and when I walked in, he said, ‘Oh, momma. I knew you’d come,’ and then he lifted his hand. And what was I going to do? What was I going to do? So I took his hand. I said, ‘I’m here, honey. I’m here.’ ”

Burks said it was probably the first time he’d been touched by a person not wearing two pairs of gloves since he arrived at the hospital. She pulled a chair to his bedside, and talked to him, and held his hand. She bathed his face with a cloth, and told him she was there. “I stayed with him for 13 hours while he took his last breath on earth,” she said.

She hasn’t talked much about that day until recently. People always ask her why she wasn’t afraid. “I have no idea,” she said. “The thought of being afraid never occurred to me until after I was already deep into the AIDS crisis. I just asked God, ‘If this is what you want me to do, just please don’t let me or my daughter get it.’ And He didn’t.”

‘Someday, all of this is going to be yours’

Ruth Coker Burks’ family came to Garland County in 1826. She was born in Hot Springs, and was a childhood friend of Bill Clinton’s. While Clinton was in the White House, she said, they wrote back and forth, with Burks filling him in on all the hometown gossip from time to time.

Since at least the late 1880s, Burks’ kin have been buried in Files Cemetery, a half-acre of red dirt on top of a hill above Central Avenue in Hot Springs. Drivers using Files Road as a cut-through to avoid the traffic on Central zip past the graveyard without even seeing it. If you stand in the right spot among the old, mossy tombstones in the winter, you can see a sliver of Lake Hamilton, glimmering like a cut sapphire through a gap in the trees.

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.

“I knew that Daddy would love that about me,” she said, “and I knew that I would be able to find him if I ever needed to find him.” She put the urn in the hole and covered it over. She prayed over the grave, and it was done.

Over the next few years, as she became one of the go-to people in the state when it came to caring for those dying with AIDS, Burks would bury over 40 people in chipped cookie jars in Files Cemetery. Most of them were gay men whose families would not even claim their ashes.

“My daughter would go with me,” Burks said. “She had a little spade, and I had posthole diggers. I’d dig the hole, and she would help me. I’d bury them and we’d have a do-it-yourself funeral. I couldn’t get a priest or a preacher. No one would even say anything over their graves.”

She believes the number was 43, but she isn’t sure. Somewhere in her attic, in a box, among the dozens of yellowed day planners she calls her Books of the Dead, filled with the appointments, setbacks and medications of people 30 years gone, there is a list of names.

Burks said she always made a last effort to reach out to families before she put the urns in the ground. “I tried every time,” she said. “They hung up on me. They cussed me out. They prayed like I was a demon on the phone and they had to get me off — prayed while they were on the phone. Just crazy. Just ridiculous.”

She learned to say the funerals herself, after being rebuffed by preachers and priests too many times. Even so, she said she never doubted what she was doing. “It never made me question my faith at all,” she said. “I knew that what I was doing was right, and I knew that I was doing what God asked me. It wasn’t a voice from the sky. I knew deep in my soul.”

Elephant

After she cared for the dying man at University Hospital, people started calling, asking for her help. “They just started coming,” she said. “Word got out that there was this kind of wacko woman in Hot Springs who wasn’t afraid. They would tell them, ‘Just go to her. Don’t come to me. Here’s the name and number. Go.’… I was their hospice. Their gay friends were their hospice. Their companions were their hospice.”

Before long, she was getting referrals from rural hospitals all over the state. Financing her work through donations and sometimes her own pocket, she’d take patients to their appointments, help them get assistance when they could no longer work, help them get their medicines, and try to cheer them up when the depression was dark as a pit. She said many pharmacies wouldn’t handle prescriptions for AIDS drugs like AZT, and there was fear among even those who would. Somewhere, she said, she has a large coffee can full of 30 year-old pens. Once pharmacy clerks learned she was working with AIDS patients, she said, many of them would insist she keep the pen after signing a check. “They didn’t want it in their building,” she said. “They would come out with a can of Lysol and spray me out the door.”

She’d soon stockpiled what she called an “underground pharmacy” in her house. “I didn’t have any narcotics, but I had AZT, I had antibiotics,” she said. “People would die and leave me all of their medicines. I kept it because somebody else might not have any.”

Burks said the financial help they gave patients — from burial expenses to medications to rent for those unable to work — couldn’t have happened without the support of the gay clubs around the state, particularly Little Rock’s Discovery. “They would twirl up a drag show on Saturday night and here’d come the money,” she said. “That’s how we’d buy medicine, that’s how we’d pay rent. If it hadn’t been for the drag queens, I don’t know what we would have done.”

Norman Jones is the owner of Discovery. Opened in 1979, the club once served a primarily gay clientele, though now the crowd is often mixed. He’s old enough to remember the fear of the early days of the epidemic. In 1988, Jones helped found the charity group Helping People with AIDS, with which Burks worked. The group is still around, helping those with the disease. “She worked with us for several years there,” Jones said. “She went out and did home visits, and she’d work determining who would qualify for the money.”

Jones said that as AIDS moved into Arkansas, he and the club’s employees decided to do something to help. “The impersonators and the bartenders that worked at the club and I decided that we’d start doing once-a-year benefits to start a fund called Helping People with AIDS,” he said. “We started raising money every year and we still do so today, over 25 years later.” Jones said the money generated by the fund, as well as a percentage of the club’s sales, have helped the AIDS Foundation and other groups assisting those with the disease.

After AIDS came to Arkansas, Jones said, he started to see the changes almost immediately. Even a rumor that someone had HIV could make their friends shun them. “We had so many people who were affected by it when it first hit that it was like, wham!” he said. “It was like you were being thrown up against a brick wall. Everyone said, ‘Don’t touch them. Don’t talk to them.’ ” Even something as slight as losing a few pounds was enough to make people afraid to associate with a person, Jones said. The fear was rampant. “It made everyone feel aware that something was happening out there,” he said. “We didn’t know what was happening, but there was a fear of it.”

Burks’ stories from that time border on nightmarish, with her watching one person after another waste away before her eyes. She would sometimes go to three funerals a day in the early years, including the funerals of many people she’d befriended while fighting the disease. Many of her memories seem to have blurred together into a kind of terrible shade. Others are told with perfect, minute clarity.

There was the man whose family insisted he be baptized in a creek in October, three days before he died, to wash away the sin of being gay; whose mother pressed a spoonful of oatmeal to his lips pleading, “Roger, eat. Please eat, Roger. Please, please, please” until Burks gently took the spoon and bowl from her; who died at 6-foot-6 and 75 pounds; whose aunts came to his parents’ house after the funeral in plastic suits and yellow gloves to double-bag his clothes and scrub everything, even the ceiling fan, with bleach.

She recalled the odd sensation of sitting with dying people while they filled out their own death certificate, because Burks knew she wouldn’t be able to call on their families for the required information. “We’d sit and fill it out together,” she said. “Can you imagine filling out your death certificate before you die? But I didn’t have that information. I wouldn’t have their mother’s maiden name or this, that or the other. So I’d get a pizza and we’d have pizza and fill out the death certificate.”

She remembered the Little Rock man who “had so much fluid on his lungs that he couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t talk, and he would gag when he was trying to talk. His mother, we had called and called and called. … He wanted to talk to his mother and wanted me to try again. I got the answering machine, and I just handed the phone to him. He cried and gagged. It was excruciating listening to him ask his mother if she’d come to the hospital. She never came. The day before the funeral, she called and asked if she could come to the funeral. He’s buried in [Files] cemetery.”

She recalled the mother who called Burks up and demanded to know how much longer it would be before her son died. ” ‘I just want to know, when is he going to die?’ ” Burks recalled the woman asking. “‘We have to get on with our lives, and he’s holding up our lives. We can’t go on with our lives until he dies. He’s ruined our lives, and we don’t want people up here to know [he has AIDS], so how long do you think he’s going to stay here?’ Like it was a punishment to her.”

Billy, however, is the one who hit her hardest, and the one she remembers most clearly of all. He was one of the youngest she ever cared for, a female impersonator in his early 20s. He was beautiful, she said, perfect and fine-boned. She still has one of Billy’s dresses in her closet up in Rogers: a tiny, flame-red designer number, intricate as an orchid. It was Billy’s mother, she said, who called up to ask how much longer it would be before they could get on with their lives.

As Billy’s health declined, Burks accompanied him to the mall in Little Rock to quit his job at a store there. Afterward, she said, he wept, Burks holding the frail young man as shoppers streamed around them. “He broke down just sobbing in the middle of the mall,” she said. “I just stood there and held him until he quit sobbing. People were looking and pointing and all that, but I couldn’t care less.”

Once, a few weeks before Billy died — he weighed only 55 pounds, the lightest she ever saw, light as a feather, so light that she was able to lift his body from the bed with just her forearms — Burks had taken Billy to an appointment in Little Rock. Afterward, they were driving around aimlessly, trying to get his spirits up. She often felt like crying in those days, she said, but she couldn’t let herself. She had to be strong for them.

“He was so depressed. It was horrible,” she said. “We were driving by the zoo, and somebody was riding an elephant. He goes: ‘You know, I’ve never ridden an elephant.’ I said: ‘Well, we’ll fix that.’ ” And she turned the car around. Somewhere, in the boxes that hold all her terrible memories, there’s a picture of the two of them up on the back of the elephant, Ruth Coker Burks in her heels and dress, Billy with a rare smile.

Two or more

When it was too much, she said, she’d go fishing. And it wasn’t all terrible. While Burks got to see the worst of people, she said, she was also privileged to see people at their best, caring for their partners and friends with selflessness, dignity and grace. She said that’s why she’s been so happy to see gay marriage legalized all over the country.

“I watched these men take care of their companions, and watch them die,” she said. “I’ve seen them go in and hold them up in the shower. They would hold them while I washed them. They would carry them back to the bed. We would dry them off and put lotion on them. They did that until the very end, knowing that they were going to be that person before long. Now, you tell me that’s not love and devotion? I don’t know a lot of straight people that would do that.”

Sometimes, she would listen to the confessions of the dying. “Whatever they wanted to tell their God, I would help them tell their God,” she said. “I figured, if the religious people weren’t going to do it, someone has to. If God wanted me to do this, then surely I can say: Yes, you’re going to heaven. … The Bible says that if you’re two or more, and you ask God for forgiveness, He will forgive you. There were two of us, so that was the best I could do.”

In all the years she worked with AIDS patients, she said, she never wore gloves unless the patients had broken skin. It was touching them, she believes, that kept those she cared for alive longer than others. By the 1990s, experts in the field were beginning to take note.

“My [HIV] patients lived two years longer than the national average,” Burks said. “They would send people from all over the world to the National Institutes of Health, they would send them to the CDC, and they would send them to me. They sent them to me so they could see what I was doing that helped them live. I think it was because I loved them. They were like my children, even though I was burying people my age.”

Burks helped care for Raymond Harwood, a Hot Springs resident who died in 1994 at age 42. His father, Jim Harwood, said Burks met Raymond through an outreach program sponsored by the local Catholic Church. Jim recalled Burks as a very caring person. “She was absolutely sweet,” Harwood said. “One of the kindest, sweetest people I’ve ever known.”

God, Harwood said, has a hand in everything, so He had a hand in bringing Burks into their lives. Harwood said he was surprised to hear from Burks that some parents abandoned their children when they were diagnosed with AIDS.

“I wasn’t brought up that way,” Harwood said. “Are you going to desert your son? I don’t care what he did. He could have gone out and murdered people. He’s still your son. You may not like what he does, but you love him.”

Back to God

Ruth Coker Burks had a stroke five years ago, early enough in her life that she can’t help but believe that the stress of the bad old days had something to do with it. After the stroke, she had to relearn everything: to talk, to feed herself, to read and write. It’s probably a miracle she’s not buried in Files Cemetery herself.

After better drugs, education, understanding and treatment made her work obsolete, she moved to Florida for several years, where she worked as a funeral director and a fishing guide. When Bill Clinton was elected president, she served as a White House consultant on AIDS education.

A few years ago, she moved to Rogers to be closer to her grandchildren. In 2013, she went to bat for three foster children who were removed from the elementary school at nearby Pea Ridge after administrators heard that one of them might be HIV positive. Burks said she couldn’t believe she was still dealing with the same, knee-jerk fears in the 21st century.

The work she and others did in the 1980s and 1990s has mostly been forgotten, partly because so many of those she knew back then have died. She’s not the only one who did that work, but she’s one of the few who survived. And so she has become the keeper of memory.

She was surprised in recent months when a producer with the oral history project StoryCorps reached out to her, asking her to tell her story on tape. Part of that interview was eventually broadcast on National Public Radio. She talked to the BBC this week, and other requests for interviews keep coming. She honestly seems a little shocked that anyone cares after all these years.

She talks of those days like an old soldier, tears only touching her eyes when she speaks of Billy, or her father’s grave, or how she sometimes wonders if her choice to help AIDS patients as a young woman, and the ostracism that brought, may have kept her from being everything she could have been. Still, she clearly sees those years as the time when she had a mission, maybe even one ordained by a higher power. Too, she said, she loved and believes she was loved by the people whose lives she touched — every one. Even as they were dying, they showed her what bravery is, and brought joy into her life. “They were good days,” she said, “because I was blessed with handing these people back to God.”

She hasn’t been back to Files Cemetery since her stroke. While she made sure it was kept up back when she lived in Hot Springs, it appeared to have been let go a bit when the reporter visited in late December, some of the tombstones pushed over and broken, the snag of a dead oak left to rot among the graves. Even without knowing the story of the place, it might have been downright spooky if not for the constant stream of traffic cruising by at 10 miles an hour over the speed limit.

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.”

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