04/11/2026
It is such a privilege to that Heart Touch is a part of this lineage and that we continue this work today. Please read and consider becoming a part of the hospice and palliative caretaking community. Enrollment is now open for our May 2-3 Heart Touch Method Training.
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In 1984, Ruth Coker Burks was 25 years old, visiting a friend at a hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas. She noticed a cluster of nurses outside one room — drawing straws. Someone had to go in.
Ruth didn't wait for the straws. She opened the door herself.
Inside was a young man who looked like he weighed barely 80 pounds. He was curled in the bed, trembling, dying. And he was completely alone. Over and over, barely above a whisper, he kept saying the same word.
"Mama."
Ruth stepped back into the hall and told the nurses to call his mother.
They looked at her. "Honey, we've called. He's been here six weeks. Nobody's coming."
She made them give her the number. She tried one last time herself.
The mother's answer was brief and final: her son was sinful. He was already dead to her. She would not be coming.
Ruth went back into that room, sat down beside him, and took his hand.
She stayed for 13 hours.
She held the hand of a dying stranger — a young man whose own mother had refused to come — and she made sure he did not 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 in Hot Springs, where her father and grandparents were buried. The nearest funeral home willing to handle an AIDS death was 70 miles away. She paid from her own pocket. A local potter gave her a chipped cookie jar to use as an urn. Ruth used posthole diggers to break the earth herself.
No minister would come. So she spoke the kind words over the grave.
She thought that would be the end of it.
It was only the beginning.
Word traveled — quietly, desperately — through the networks of fear that stretched across rural Arkansas in those years.
There's a woman in Hot Springs who isn't afraid. She'll sit with you. She'll make sure you're buried with dignity when your family won't come.
The dying began to arrive. Young men from rural hospitals across the state, abandoned by the people who were supposed to love them most, finding their way to the one person who wouldn't turn them away.
Over the next decade, Ruth Coker Burks cared for more than a thousand people living and dying with AIDS. She personally buried 40 of them in Files Cemetery — digging the graves herself, sometimes with her young daughter at her side, a small spade in her little hands, because no one else would speak over those graves.
She called parents. Pleaded with them to come say goodbye. To come claim their own child.
Most refused.
"Who knew," she later said, "there'd come a time when parents didn't want to bury their own children?"
But in those same years, Ruth also witnessed something she never forgot.
She watched gay men care for dying partners with a tenderness and devotion that left her speechless. She watched a community that was terrified and grieving choose, over and over again, to take care of its own — and to take care of her.
When money ran out for medicine and rent, the answer came from an unlikely corner.
"They would twirl up a drag show on Saturday night," she said, "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."
By the mid-1990s, new treatments began to change the course of the epidemic. The wave of deaths gradually slowed. And Ruth Coker Burks — like so many of the quiet heroes of those years — faded from public memory.
In 2020 she published a memoir, All the Young Men, because she needed the world to understand what happened in Arkansas. What happened across America. What happens when fear persuades people to abandon their own children — and what becomes possible when even one person refuses to walk away.
She had no medical training. No institutional support. No funding.
She had compassion. Courage. Posthole diggers. And a family cemetery with room enough for the ones nobody else would claim.
That was enough to make sure a thousand people didn't die believing they were forgotten.
The next time someone tells you a single person can't make a difference —
Remember the straws the nurses were drawing.
Remember the 13 hours she stayed with a stranger.
Remember the 40 graves she dug with her own hands.
She opened that door in 1984.
And a thousand lives were changed because she did.
