substack.com
Kristen Kroll (@kristenkroll)
In 1984, Ruth Coker Burks was 25 years old, visiting a friend at a hospital in Little Rock, when she noticed nurses drawing straws outside a patient's room. Someone had to go in. She didn't wait for the straws. She opened the door herself. What she found inside would define the next decade of her life. 🕯️** Inside was a young man reduced to bones — maybe 80 pounds, dying alone, terrified. He kept whispering one word. *"Mama."* Ruth told the nurses to call his mother. They laughed. *"Honey, we've called. He's been here six weeks. Nobody's coming."* Ruth made them give her the number. She tried one last time. The mother's answer was cold and final: her son was sinful, already dead to her, and she would not be coming. So Ruth went back into that room. She took his hand. She stayed. For 13 hours, she held the hand of a dying stranger, promising him he wouldn't leave this world alone. When he died, his family refused to claim the body. Ruth decided she would bury him herself. She owned plots in her family cemetery in Hot Springs — where her father and grandparents rested. The nearest funeral home willing to handle an AIDS death was 70 miles away. Ruth paid from her own pocket. A local potter gave her a chipped cookie jar for an urn. She used posthole diggers to dig the grave herself. She spoke kind words over the earth because no minister would come to pray over a man who died of AIDS. Ruth thought that would be the end. It was the beginning. Word traveled through the quiet networks of fear and desperation across Arkansas. *There's a woman in Hot Springs who isn't afraid. There's a woman who will sit with you. There's a woman who will make sure you're buried with dignity when your own family won't claim you.* They started arriving. Dying young men from rural hospitals across the state, abandoned by the people who were supposed to love them most. Over the next decade, Ruth Coker Burks cared for more than 1,000 people dying of AIDS. She personally buried 40 of them in Files Cemetery — digging the graves herself, with her young daughter beside her carrying a small spade, holding their own funerals because no one else would speak over these graves. Of those 1,000 people, only a handful of families didn't abandon their dying children. Ruth called parents. Begged them to come say goodbye. To claim their child's body. Most refused. *"Who knew,"* she said, *"there'd come a time when parents didn't want to bury their own children?"* But she also witnessed something else — something that stayed with her. She watched gay men care for dying partners with a devotion that shattered every stereotype. She watched a terrified community take care of its own — and take care of her. *"They would twirl up a drag show on Saturday night and here'd come the money. That's how we bought medicine. That's how we paid rent. If it hadn't been for the drag queens, I don't know what we would have done."* By the mid-1990s, new treatments emerged. The crisis began to shift. And then, like so many heroes of the AIDS crisis, Ruth Coker Burks faded from public memory. She wrote a memoir in 2019 called *All the Young Men* because she needed people to understand what happened in Arkansas. What happened across America. What happens when fear convinces people to abandon their own children. And what happens when one person refuses to walk past a door everyone else fears. She didn't have medical training. She didn't have institutional backing. She didn't have money. She had compassion. Courage. Posthole diggers. And a family cemetery. That was enough to make sure 1,000 people didn't die believing they were worthless. The next time someone says one person can't change anything — Remember the red bag on the door. Remember the 13 hours she stayed with a stranger. Remember the 40 graves she dug with her own hands. She walked through that door in 1984. And 1,000 lives were forever changed because of it.
