In a hospital in Arkansas in the mid-1980s, there was one room the nurses would not enter. The door was marked. The food trays piled up outside it, untouched. The staff drew straws to decide who would have to go in.
A young single mother, visiting a friend down the hall, watched all this — and then did the thing no one else would do.
She walked in. And what happened in that room set the course of the rest of her life...
Her name is Ruth Coker Burks, and in the mid-1980s she was an ordinary young woman in Hot Springs, Arkansas — a single mother with no medical training, raising her daughter and selling real estate.
This was the height of the early AIDS crisis, a time it is genuinely hard to remember clearly now: a terrifying new disease, almost always fatal, wrapped in fear and shame and misinformation so total that hospital staff were frightened to be in the same room as a patient, and families disowned their own dying sons.
Visiting a friend at the hospital one day, Ruth noticed the sealed room, the untouched trays, the nurses who wouldn't go in. And, on impulse, she slipped inside.
There she found a young man, wasted almost to nothing, dying of AIDS. He was desperate for one thing: to see his mother before he died. Ruth went and asked the nurses to call her. By her account, the young man's mother refused to come — she said her son was already dead to her, and she would not claim the body.
So Ruth stayed. She sat with him, and held his hand, and was with him when he died — so that at the very least he would not die alone. And afterward, when no one else would, she paid to have him cremated and buried him in her own family's cemetery plot at Files Cemetery in Hot Springs.
That, by every account, is how it began. And word got around.
Nurses, it's said, began quietly slipping her phone number to their frightened AIDS patients, telling them — in a line Ruth has repeated for years — that "there's a crazy woman in Hot Springs who isn't afraid of you."
And her phone started to ring.
Over the following decade, Ruth Coker Burks became, for a whole community of dying men, the person who would not turn away. Young men whose families had disowned them, whose churches had cast them out, whose doctors sometimes wouldn't enter their rooms — they called her, and she came. She drove them to appointments. She helped them apply for assistance. She fought to get them medication; she has described keeping AIDS drugs like AZT in her own pantry because pharmacies wouldn't always dispense them. She spent her own real-estate commissions on their rent, their groceries, their prescriptions. She became, as she put it, their hospice — alongside their partners and their friends, the "chosen family" who cared for them when their blood family would not.
And when they died — as, in those years before effective treatment, so many did — she buried them. Funeral homes across Arkansas often refused to handle the bodies of AIDS patients. So Ruth used her family's plots at Files Cemetery, sometimes digging graves herself, often at night. She has said she interred the ashes of more than forty men there over the years — men their own families would not claim, laid to rest by a near-stranger who refused to let them vanish unmourned.
It was not all grief. Ruth made a point of giving these men real goodbyes — gravesides where their true friends and partners could gather, where there was music and there were stories. And the wider gay community rallied around her work: at the Discovery nightclub in Little Rock, drag queens held fundraisers to help pay for her patients' care. That community, she has said, became closer to her than the family she was raised in.
Her reach eventually extended beyond Hot Springs. Ruth had grown up in the same town as Bill Clinton, and when Clinton became president, she served as a consultant on AIDS education for his administration — carrying what she'd learned on the front lines of the epidemic toward national policy. Yet even then, by every account, she never stopped answering her own phone.
It's worth being straight with you about one thing, because this story has been told and retold so many times that the details have sometimes blurred. Ruth's own accounts of exactly how many men she cared for and buried have varied, and some people in Hot Springs have questioned whether the numbers grew in the telling; careful researchers note that the precise figures — often given as "hundreds" cared for and "around forty" buried — rest largely on Ruth's own memory and are hard to verify decades on. That's a fair caution, and honesty requires including it.
But it should not be allowed to obscure the thing that is not in dispute: that in a time of extraordinary cruelty and fear, when institutions and even families turned their backs on dying young men, Ruth Coker Burks did not. She showed up. She held hands at deathbeds. She paid for cremations out of her own pocket. She gave the abandoned a place to be buried and someone to grieve them. Whether the number is dozens or hundreds, each one was a human being who died with a little more dignity because she was there.
The work took a toll. Ruth later suffered a stroke she believes was tied to the years of stress, and had to relearn how to talk, read, and write. In 2020, she finally told her own story in full in a memoir, All the Young Men. She's been honored for her decades of service to a community the world had spent years trying to ignore.
She often thinks of the young men she lost — of Billy, a dear friend who died at just 24, one face among the many she sat beside. She never set out to be anyone's hero, or a saint, or a symbol. She was just a young mother who, one afternoon, walked through a door that everyone else was too afraid to open.
And having walked through it, she simply never let it close again.
Had you heard of Ruth Coker Burks, or lived through those years yourself? Tell us below. And here's one for today: what do you think makes a person walk toward the suffering that everyone else is walking away from?
