The nurses drew straws to see who had to enter. She walked in without asking—and spent the next decade burying the people no one else would touch.
1984 University Hospital, Little Rock, Arkansas.
Ruth Coker Burks was 25, visiting a friend, when she noticed something that made the hospital staff freeze: a red biohazard bag hanging over a patient's door.
She watched nurses draw straws. Someone had to go inside.
Ruth had a gay cousin. She understood what that red bag meant in 1984.
AIDS—the disease killing thousands, the diagnosis that turned families into strangers and hospitals into prisons of fear.
She didn't wait for the straws. She opened the door and walked in.
Inside was a young man reduced to bones, maybe 80 pounds, dying alone in agony. He was terrified. And he kept whispering one word: "Mama."
Ruth told the nurses to call his mother.
"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 to watch him die.
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—Files Cemetery in Hot Springs—where her father and grandparents rested. "No one wanted him," she later said.
"I promised him I'd take him somewhere beautiful, where my family would watch over him."
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—the kind for building fences—to dig the grave herself.
She buried him and 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.
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.
Ruth became their everything.
Over the next decade, Ruth Coker Burks cared for more than 1,000 people dying of AIDS—mostly young men disowned by their families the moment diagnosis became death sentence.
She personally buried 40 of them in Files Cemetery.
Her young daughter would come along, carrying a small spade while Ruth worked the posthole diggers. They'd hold their own funerals because still, no one would speak over these graves.
Of those 1,000 people, only a handful of families didn't abandon their dying children.
Ruth would call parents. Beg them to come say goodbye. To claim their child's body.
"Who knew there'd come a time," Ruth said, "when parents didn't want to bury their own children?"
But while Ruth witnessed the worst of humanity—families turning their backs, churches slamming doors, communities built on fear—she also witnessed the best.
She watched gay men care for dying partners with devotion that shattered every stereotype. "I watched these men take care of their companions and watch them die," she said. "You tell me that's not love."
And she saw how a terrified community took care of its own—and 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."
The drag queens raised funds. The community rallied. Ruth kept digging graves and holding hands, making sure no one died forgotten.
By the mid-1990s, new treatments emerged.
The crisis began to shift from certain death to manageable condition—slowly, painfully.
Ruth's work became less urgent.
And then, like so many heroes of the AIDS crisis, Ruth Coker Burks faded from public memory.
Her story became whispered history, known only to those she'd served and those who remembered what Arkansas—what America—was like when dying of AIDS meant dying abandoned.
But Ruth never forgot the 40 graves in Files Cemetery.
The cookie jars and ceramic urns. The promises she'd made that they would be remembered.
For years, she dreamed of a memorial. Something to say: this happened. These people lived.
Through crowdfunding, that memorial is finally being built.
"This is what happened. In 1984, it started. They kept coming. And they knew they would be remembered, loved, and cared for—that someone would say a kind word when they died."
Ruth Coker Burks is in her 60s now.
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 institutional backing.
She had compassion. Courage. Posthole diggers. And a family cemetery.
That was enough to ensure 1,000 people didn't die believing they were worthless.
The next time someone says one person can't change anything, remember Ruth Coker Burks.
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.
Remember the drag queens who fundraised on Saturday nights.
Remember that love is always stronger than fear.
And remember that sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is simply refuse to let another human being die alone.
Ruth saw a red biohazard bag in 1984.
She walked through that door anyway.
And 1,000 lives were forever changed because of it.
