🏳️🌈 Ruth Coker Burks 🏳️🌈
“In 1984, when Burks was 25 & a young mother living in Arkansas, she would often visit a hospital to care for a friend who had cancer. During one visit, she noticed the nurses would draw straws, afraid to go into one room, its door sealed by a big red bag.
She asked why and the nurses told her the patient had Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), later known as AIDS. On a repeat visit, and seeing the big red bag on the door, Burks decided to disregard the warnings and sneaked into the room.
In the bed was a skeletal young man, who told her he wanted to see his mother before he died. She left the room and told the nurses, who said, "Honey, his mother’s not coming. He’s been here 6 weeks. Nobody’s coming”. Burks called his mother anyway, who refused to come visit her
son, who she described as a "sinner" & already dead to her, and that she wouldn't even claim his body when he died. “I went back in his room and when I walked in, he said, "Oh, momma. I knew you’d come", and then he lifted his hand. And what was I going to do? So I took his hand.
I said, "I’m here, honey. I’m here”, Burks later recounted. She pulled a chair to his bedside, talked to him, and held his hand until he died 13 hours later. After finally finding a funeral home that would his body, and paying for the cremation out of her own savings,
Burks buried his ashes on her family's large plot in Files Cemetery.
After this first encounter, Burks cared for other patients who needed her help. She would take them to appointments, obtain medications, apply for assistance, and even kept supplies of AIDS medications on hand,
as some pharmacies would not carry them. Burks work soon became well known in the city and she received financial assistance from gay bars, "They would twirl up a drag show on Saturday night and here'd come the money...That's how we'd buy medicine, that's how we'd pay rent.
If it hadn't been for the drag queens, I don't know what we would’ve done", she said.
Over the next 30 yrs (w assistance from her daughter) Burks cared for 1,000+ ppl & buried more than 40 on her family's plot (most of whom were gay men whose families wouldn’t claim their ashes).
For this, she has been nicknamed the 'Cemetery Angel'.
“Someday, I’d love to get a monument that says: This is what happened. In 1984, it started. They just kept coming & coming. And they knew they would be remembered, loved, and taken care of, and that someone would say a kind word over them when they died” - Ruth Coker Burks
“To all the mamas who will hear the words ‘Down syndrome‘ for the first time this year, remember:
1. Your child will become your greatest teacher. You will watch this little person learn & master ways to adapt into fitting into a world not made for them. It will astound you.
2. The milestones. Forget about them. Your child will do all things in THEIR time. Put the books down. Stop Googling and enjoy that little baby in front of you – exactly where they are at and not where literature says they are supposed to be.
3. Your heart will break over and over again by the stereotypes held by society. It’s your job to help break down those barriers. You are now an advocate. Mama bear. Tiger Mama. You will grow to be passionate and you’ll become an expert on your child’s diagnosis.
“Don’t really get all the #BLM stuff?
400 years ago white people enslaved black people.
And sold them.
And treated them as less than human.
For 250 years.
While white men built the country and created its laws and its systems of government.
While 10, 15 generations of white families got to grow, flourish and make choices that could make their lives better.
150 years ago white people "freed" black people from slavery.
But then angry white people created laws that made it impossible for them to vote.
Or to own land.
Or to have the same rights as white people. And even erected monuments glorifying people who actively had fought to keep them enslaved.
All while another 5, 10 generations of white families got to grow and accumulate wealth and gain land and get an education.
Essay from Josh Lerner, MD after @CDCgov loosens guidelines for everyone on the front lines
“In one of the most vivid scenes in @HBO miniseries "Chernobyl" soldiers dressed in leather smocks ran out into radioactive areas to literally shovel radioactive material out of harms way
Horrifically under-protected, they suited up anyway. In another scene, soldiers fashioned genital protection from scrap metal out of desperation while being sent to other hazardous areas.
Please don't tell me that in the richest country in the world in the 21st century, I’m
supposed to work in a fictionalized Soviet-era disaster zone & fashion my own face mask out of cloth bc other Americans hoard supplies for personal use & so-called leaders sit around in meetings hearing themselves talk. I ran to a bedside the other day to intubate a crashing,