All her sons: Ruth Coker Burks, the "Cemetery Angel" - CBS Sunday Morning (Repeat)
(Did not watch it first time, still touching)
This story was originally broadcast on December 1, 2019. In June 2020 this report by correspondent Seth Doane, producer Dustin Stephens and editor Steven Tyler received an Excellence in Journalism Award from NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists.
======
It was a most unusual inheritance: Ruth Coker Burks said she was given 262 plots in a historic cemetery, after a family feud pitted her mother against her uncle: "My mother got in a huge argument with her brother when I was 10, and bought all the remaining spaces in the family cemetery so he and his family couldn't be buried with the rest of us. That was the meanest thing she could think to settle the score.
"What am I gonna do with a cemetery? You know, a nice ring or watch, but not a cemetery!"
"But it would wind up that you would need a cemetery," said correspondent Seth Doane.
"Who would have ever thought?"
The plots sat mostly unused until the AIDS crisis hit Hot Springs, Arkansas. "Death and I got to be old friends," she said.
Coker Burks – a self-described "straight church-lady" – remembers when the disease was referred to as the "gay cancer."
In the early 1980s health officials were declaring an epidemic of an illness that claimed more victims than toxic shock and legionnaire's disease combined, but which was a mystery to most of the country. Scientists scrambled to learn more. By 1984, researchers identified that the HIV virus, as it would come to be known, caused AIDS. By 1985, there were more than 20,000 reported AIDS cases worldwide.
"See, people think that the AIDS epidemic happened in San Francisco, or it happened in New York, it didn't happen in the center of the country. But it did," said Coker Burks.
And as fear swirled, Coker Burks, then in her mid-20s, found herself face-to-face with the disease while visiting a friend at an Arkansas hospital. She'd noticed a room no one was entering. An AIDS patient was inside: "He was so frail and so pale and so near death. And he weighed less than 100 pounds. And you couldn't really tell him from the sheets on the bed."
What happened next was dramatized in a short film, titled "Ruth," when the patient (known as Jimmy) asked to speak with his mother. Coker Burks informed a nurse, who told her:
Nurse: "Did you go into that room? Have you lost your mind? Do you know what's happening?"
Ruth: "I'd like his mother's phone number. He wants his mother."
Nurse: "Honey, his mother is not coming. He's been in that room for six weeks and nobody is coming."
But Coker Burns returned to Jimmy's room, and says she sat with him for the next 13 hours.
Doane asked, "What made you stay with him until he passed away?"
"He needed me," she replied. "His mother had already abandoned him."
Nobody wanted his remains, so she says she paid for his cremation, and then put his ashes in a cookie jar and brought them up to that cemetery. She thinks she ended up helping maybe hundreds with AIDS: mostly men, many abandoned by families and churches. "It sounds like it wasn't always 'Love thy neighbor,'" said Doane.
"No, it wasn't."
More..
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/all-her-sons-ruth-coker-burks-the-cemetery-angel/
= new reply since forum marked as read
