Eventually scientists realized that many of the people affected were gay men, and that the disease was transmitted through sexual contact, saliva, or blood. That didn't stop the ever-growing spread of misinformation or the growing panic. There was a growing stigma against gay men - or, at the very least, indifference. If a gay man developed the disease, family members and friends shunned them. After all, "straight" people said to each other, these men were sinners. Who cared if they died? Sometimes even doctors and nurses literally left the emaciated ill men to die because they were unwilling to touch their patients.
Ruth didn't set out to be an activist. But she was frequently visiting a friend with cancer in the hospital and, one day, walking the halls, noticed a room with a big red bag over the door, five or six trays of food on the floor, and a cart stacked with gowns, masks, and booties. Every time she watched them, the nurses on duty were drawing straws to see who would have the dubious honor of entering that room.
Figuring out that this patient must have AIDS, Ruth says, "I walked right in. I just couldn't stand it. I knew it was AIDS, but I went in anyway. The man, Jimmy, was so near death, it was shocking. I walked up to his bed and took his hand. I knew what he had, but I didn't gown up. And I wasn't afraid." Later, she realized Who had impelled her into that room. God.
Jimmy wanted his mother. Ruth figured that was simple enough. She'd make a call and his family would deal with it. But the nurses, after telling her she was on her own if she got AIDS, told her the gut-wrenching truth about Jimmy's mother. "I asked about contacting his mother, and they told me, 'Honey, his momma's not coming. Nobody is coming. Nobody has come in six weeks." Jimmy's mother hung up on her. Ruth called back, and the woman said, "He's a sinner; he died years ago. I don't want to have anything to do with that man in the hospital." Jimmy's mother hung up on her again.
Ruth took a deep breath and went back into Jimmy's room. She recalls, "I took his hand, and he said, 'Oh, momma, I knew you'd come.' What was I supposed to do? I was twenty-five years old and had never encountered anything like that. I just held his hand and talked to him. He died 13 hours later." Ruth promised him that she would take charge of his burial and bring his ashes home with her to be buried in her family's cemetery, right next to her Daddy and Grandparents, and that they'd watch over him. Ruth did indeed bury him there, and devised her own do-it-yourself funeral ceremony since no priest or minister would come to the grave.
Ruth thought that she had done her one good deed. But God wasn't finished with her yet. One after another, men dying from AIDS contacted her. Sadly, many called because their families and friends had disowned them. Before long, she was getting referrals from all over the state. She had no medical expertise, but she did what needed to be done. She took the emaciated men - one weighed fifty-five pounds when he died - to Doctors' appointments, picked up their various prescriptions, helped them fill out forms for assistance. She sat with them, bathed them, fed them, consoled them, talked them out of despair. Her biggest supporters were the Gay Clubs in the state; their donations helped her buy medicine and pay rent for apartments.
When her patients' families had cut them off, because of religious conviction or fear of the virus, she even helped them fill out their own death certificates, because they alone knew the facts that were needed. "We'd sit and fill it out together," she says. "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."
Why wasn't she afraid? "I have no idea," she says. "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.'"
Unless a man's skin was broken, Ruth never used gloves She loved her charges as much as if they were her own children, even though most were her own age. Her patients, on average, lived more than two years past the national average, and it was, she says, because of how she touched them with love. Often she felt like crying because of their terrible physical and emotional suffering, but she couldn't let herself. She knew that she needed to be strong for them.
She remembers caring for nearly a thousand men with AIDS, most of them gay, and burying at least forty-three men's ashes when their families refused to claim their bodies. Sometimes she paid for their cremations herself. She couldn't afford urns, so she buried them in chipped cookie jars donated by Dryden Pottery in Palm Springs. Her little daughter helped her, digging a hole with a child's shovel, because no gravediggers would help. Many people also called, asking if they could have her permission to sprinkle their friends' or partners' ashes in the cemetery, so Ruth is unsure how many cremains eventually ended up in Files Cemetery.
She would always contact the families one last time before she buried the men. "I tried every time. 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."
When her mother told her that one day she would inherit the family cemetery, Ruth had wondered what she would ever do with it. "Who knew," she says now, "there'd come a time when people didn't want to bury their children?"
For about a decade, between 1984 and the mid-nineties, when better HIV drugs and more enlightened medical care made her ministry obsolete, Ruth continued the mission she believed that God gave her. She never doubted what she was doing. "It never made me question my faith at all. 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."
One of the gifts of her ministry, she says, is that, although she saw people desert family members or friends out of fear and/or moral judgement, she also often encountered people at their best, caring for their friends and/or partners with selflessness, dignity, and grace.
"I watched these men take care of their companions, and watch them die," she says. "I've seen them go 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."
Often, she listened to the confessions of the dying. "Whatever they wanted to tell their God, I would help them tell their God. 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."
Ruth Coker Burks has had a stroke, possibly brought on by the stress of those earlier years. Her greatest joy today is that she's moved closer to her grandchildren. She doesn't regret the years of her mission to AIDS patients, even though it caused her and her daughter to be ostracized by many. She believes that the lives of all the men she cared for touched her life profoundly - because she loved them and they loved her. Even as they were dying, they showed her what true bravery is - and, in the midst of suffering and death, she found deep fulfillment and joy in caring for them. She says, simply, "They were good days, because I was blessed with handing these people back to God."
(Quotes in this blog are from "The Arkansas Times.")
St. Paul tells us to put on the Mind and Heart of Christ. Jesus himself, through His words and actions, shows us what it means to have His Heart, and it is very simple. If you have the Heart of Christ, you are merciful. You say, as Louis Pasteur says, "You suffer. This is enough for me. You belong to me, and I shall help you." It's pouring out God's love over someone else because you know he or she is your brother or sister in Christ, is God's precious child, is as important to God as you are. It's being wounded, pierced in your own heart, because love inevitably brings us suffering.
Merciful love happens when we refuse to put preconditions on our compassion, when we do not judge people and declare them unworthy of our care. God knows how many people many "Christians" today judge as unworthy of mercy because they are non-Christians or atheists, "illegal" refugees or of a different sexual orientation, or they are single mothers, or they are poor, and should take care of themselves because, "damn it, I made it on my own."
Ruth shows us how radically simple God's Mercy is: it's having pizza with a dying gay man, bathing him, loving, respecting, and consoling his grieving partner, burying the ashes of one of society's rejects, a man whose own mother has disowned him. Can we see Jesus doing anything less? Jesus, who would eat with anyone, listen to anyone, heal anyone, even those his own community disowned? Jesus Who died forgiving the ones who murdered Him? Jesus, who said living with him forever depends on our feeding, clothing, and caring for whoever God sends into our life, without questions, preconditions, or complaints?
Mercy is Loving another without having gloves on. Allowing the tender vulnerability of our bodies, minds, hearts, and souls to touch another without fear of the consequences. It's risking everything we are because we believe that we hear God urging us on to be His hands and feet, His tender words. God wants to love others through us; God's desperately searching for people like us who will care for His most vulnerable own, the most forsaken of this world, the ones He weeps over because they are alone.
And God never calls us from the sky. God calls us from deep within our own souls so we know that the Call is for us. All we need to do to answer God, to say "Yes" to Mercy, is to take that first step. To discover our own way to love, suffering, and eternity by doing something as simple - and radical - as opening the door to a hospital room that no one else, because of fear, will enter. But we don't have to be afraid. Jesus promises us - as he promised Ruth - "Perfect Love, Perfect Mercy, always casts out your fear."