13/10/2019
What a Great Human Being!
Its not the best photo of us but let me assure you this is the most incredible woman. If you don’t know her, this is Ruth Coker Burks and in the eighties she stayed by the hospital bedside of men with AIDS whose families had abandoned them. She spoke tonight at the inspiring where there were so many amazing people in the room. Ruth’s story made me cry. She said when she was 25 she was visiting a sick friend in hospital where she saw a man who was dying in a room all alone. He was crying out for his mother. The nurses were all pulling straws to see who would get the short one and have to tend to him. They told her to stay away from him but Ruth snuck in and spent 13 hours by his bedside. His name was Jimmy. Ruth phoned jimmy’s mother to beg her to come and visit him but his mother said ‘my son is already dead to me’. He died with no family to come and collect his body. After he died, ruth found a funeral home that would take him and then she and her then 2 year old daughter buried jimmy’s ashes in a cookie jar in the cemetery in her family plot because ‘who wouldn’t want to be buried in a cookie jar?’. Over the next 30 years she helped over 1000 men who had been diagnosed with AIDS. She took them to appointments, helped them get their medicine, offered whatever support she could including burying a further 40 in her family plot. What an incredible act of human kindness and love. I couldn’t get over it. I told her ‘your story is one I will never forget’ and she said, ‘they were all buried with love’. People can be truly wonderful sometimes, can’t they? X
