Arkansas ‘AIDS Angel’ book recounts time spent caring for people left to die alone
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(KNWA) — She’s known as the AIDS Angel. Ruth Coker Burks is a Northwest Arkansas woman who made sure hundreds of AIDS patients did not die alone. Now she’s sharing her story in a new book, hoping to remove the stigma around that deadly virus as we battle another one during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Five solid hours at a microphone may seem like a long haul, but it’s nothing for Burks.
She spent much of the 80s and 90s caring for AIDS patients in their final days.
“I worked with well over 1,000 men,” she says.
Burks said the first time was purely happenstance. It was 1984, and she was visiting a friend battling cancer at UAMS in Little Rock.
“I noticed a door with big red bag on it – ‘don’t enter,’ you know, ‘danger,’” she recalls. “The nurses were drawing straws to see who would go out and check on this young man.”
“I stepped into that room and he wanted his momma, and I thought, ‘well, that’s easy enough, I’ll go call his mother.’”
But Burks says the nurses told her bluntly – the man’s mother didn’t want a call.
“His mother’s not coming. No one’s coming. It’s been six weeks. Nobody’s coming,” she says they told her. “I ended up staying with him for over 13 hours until he took his last breath on this Earth.”
Though that man was the first, there were many others. Burks estimates she’s comforted nearly 100 men, left to die alone.“Who would ever think a time would come when parents would not even want their children to bury them?”
“Who would ever think a time would come when parents would not even want their children to bury them?”
Ruth Coker Burks
So Burks did what many families back then would not. She buried them in a cemetery she inherited in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
“I started getting phone calls after that. And more phone calls… and more phone calls,” she says. “I’ve had people call and say, ‘my lover died, my brother died. Can I sprinkle him in the cemetery?,’ and it was always, ‘yes, of course.’ I really don’t know how many people are out there now.”
Now she’s sharing her story in a new book, All The Young Men. She says she was prompted to write it after suffering a stroke in 2011.
“I knew I couldn’t take this story to my grave,” she says. “This is their story, and it needed to be told because it didn’t just happen in San Francisco or New York. It happened here.”
