Ruth Coker Burks, the cemetery angel

[JumpyTheFrog]

http://www.arktimes.com/arkansas/ruth-coker-burks-the-cemetery-angel/Content?oid=3602959

 

 

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.

 

Truly this woman was "caring for the least of these".

Edited August 2, 2016 by HoppyTheToad

[Guest]

Wow. Thank you for sharing.

[JumpyTheFrog]

She said she buried about 43 people in her family cemetery. Their families wouldn't claim the bodies/ashes.

Edited August 2, 2016 by HoppyTheToad

[umsami]

Awesome amazing woman. Thanks for sharing.  One person can make a difference. 

[Rachel]

Touching story.

[TravelingChris]

What an amazing woman!

[Tap]

Phenomenal person.  It just breaks my heart to think about how many people didn't have someone like her in their lives. The impact she made, on so many lives, is a testament to the best of humanity....and the need for her to do so......the worst of us.

Edited August 3, 2016 by Tap

[Guest]

I tried to respond earlier but the boards kept logging me out. She did a wonderful thing and blessed so many who needed her. What an example she set!

[HomeAgain]

What an amazing person!

 

The dark side of that story angered me a bit.  She should not have had to be put in the position of chaplain...mother...nurse....She did something amazing because others were so shameful.

[TheReader]

Such a beautiful story. I cried....I lost a much loved uncle to AIDS right at the tale end of the time period in the story, and it breaks my heart to know how many others went through that time utterly alone....to imagine those that had to go to their deaths far from this angel....it is heartbreaking. But to know someone was out there, loving and caring for those whose families rejected them....so beautiful.

 

Unfortunately it didn't surprise me, at all. When we first heard of the disease of AIDS, well before my uncle ended up diagnosed, my dad took us aside and instructed us not to hug my uncle, not to kiss him....this was in the very early stages of the disease even being known, and people were still completely uneducated about how it could spread. So my dad, weighing his love for his daughters against his love for his brother, did what he thought safest. Now, being a stubborn child, unaware of the potential issues, I didn't listen...I couldn't imagine anything that would make me not hug my uncle. So of course I hugged him, just like always (he wasn't sick yet anyway, we just didn't know). (I should add, after that day, my dad took me aside, in tears, and said I was right and he was so so so glad I didn't treat my uncle any differently than normal).

 

But if that kind of thing was happening even in families that loved their at risk family members....it saddens me, but doesn't surprise me, that other families rejected them all together.

 

In college, when my uncle died, I did a paper on how Christians should respond to people with AIDS. This was in the early 90s, still a very controversial, misunderstood thing. I had classmates argue that anyone with AIDS had gotten sick due to sin, and so deserved it, and therefore it was fair and right to abandon them in their time of need, they were unworthy of any caring or loving or anything we might normally do for someone in their final days.

 

When I went home to attend the dedication of my uncle's Names Project Quilt Panel, I had to endure a friend criticizing me, the whole ride home, for attending such a sinful thing, something that glorified and honored such a horrid sin. She couldn't understand that this "horrible thing" was honoring my uncle, who I loved and cherished, not some random "sinner." She really couldn't understand that this was the sort of thing I would have attended anyway, because it was honoring people's loved ones, and all the things about those people that made them who they were...not the disease that killed them. In her mind, this disease, and the so called sin that led to it, should by all rights erase everything about the people who died from it...she honestly believed the only part that mattered was how they died, and because of that, they shouldn't be memorialized, honored, remembered, and certainly not in a ceremony any "good Christian" would ever attend.

 

So....not surprised by this horribleness, at all.....sadly I witnessed it. Not in our own family, thankfully. But in the Christians around us....it was awful.

 

Sorry for the ramble....this article really struck a chord with me, the sheer beauty of what this woman did, at a time when the country was so fearful of such a relatively unknown disease, and so unaccepting of anyone who had it or even had contact with it....I hope she gets her memorial in the cemetery, to honor those who she buried there.

[MercyA]

Riveting. So much to grieve and so much to admire.