March 10th is NWGHAAD (National Women's and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day), and this is also Women's History Month, so I would like to tell you about one woman in particular who was called "the Cemetery Angel". Sounds like quite a name, doesn't it? Cemetery Angel? Interested?
Her name is Ruth Coker Burks, and she considers herself to be an unlikely advocate. A single mother and real estate agent in Arkansas, she had no medical background or training. She was just visiting a friend in the hospital in 1984 when she saw a red door, and nurses drawing straws to see who would have to go care for the patient. She sneaked into the room and met Jimmy, her first patient. Since that day, she has spent 30 years caring for people who have been abandoned by their families and even medical staff. She later became an informal adviser to then-Governor and later President Bill Clinton. She cared for over a thousand patients and also helped to bury those who were unclaimed by their families in her own family's cemetery, thus the nickname "Cemetery Angel".
Ruth found likeminded medical professionals to help care for her patients and she learned about the disease along the way. She must have been doing something right because the CDC sent professionals to learn how her patients were living on average about two years longer than other patients. That's amazing!
I found all of this information on her website. She still advocates doing podcasts. So for this National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, I wanted to learn more about the women who have been involved in the movement against this pandemic from the beginning and celebrate and honor them. Ruth is just one of the women who braved an unprecedented and unknown disease to show humanity to those who had had their humanity stripped away from them. She is a shero and should be remembered with honor.
