Ruth Coker Burks, the cemetery angel
Oct. 8th, 2015 11:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1L9MKOv:Ruth Coker Burks, the cemetery angel:
ladysaviours:
Over the next few years, as she became one of the go-to people in the state when it came to caring for those dying with AIDS, Burks would bury over 40 people in chipped cookie jars in Files Cemetery. Most of them were gay men whose families would not even claim their ashes.
“My daughter would go with me,” Burks said. “She had a little spade, and I had posthole diggers. I’d dig the hole, and she would help me. I’d bury them and we’d have a do-it-yourself funeral. I couldn’t get a priest or a preacher. No one would even say anything over their graves.”
She believes the number was 43, but she isn’t sure. Somewhere in her attic, in a box, among the dozens of yellowed day planners she calls her Books of the Dead, filled with the appointments, setbacks and medications of people 30 years gone, there is a list of names.
Burks said she always made a last effort to reach out to families before she put the urns in the ground. “I tried every time,” she said. “They hung up on me. They cussed me out. They prayed like I was a demon on the phone and they had to get me off — prayed while they were on the phone. Just crazy. Just ridiculous.”
She learned to say the funerals herself, after being rebuffed by preachers and priests too many times. Even so, she said she never doubted what she was doing. “It never made me question my faith at all,” she said. “I knew that what I was doing was right, and I knew that I was doing what God asked me. It wasn’t a voice from the sky. I knew deep in my soul.”
ladysaviours:
Over the next few years, as she became one of the go-to people in the state when it came to caring for those dying with AIDS, Burks would bury over 40 people in chipped cookie jars in Files Cemetery. Most of them were gay men whose families would not even claim their ashes.
“My daughter would go with me,” Burks said. “She had a little spade, and I had posthole diggers. I’d dig the hole, and she would help me. I’d bury them and we’d have a do-it-yourself funeral. I couldn’t get a priest or a preacher. No one would even say anything over their graves.”
She believes the number was 43, but she isn’t sure. Somewhere in her attic, in a box, among the dozens of yellowed day planners she calls her Books of the Dead, filled with the appointments, setbacks and medications of people 30 years gone, there is a list of names.
Burks said she always made a last effort to reach out to families before she put the urns in the ground. “I tried every time,” she said. “They hung up on me. They cussed me out. They prayed like I was a demon on the phone and they had to get me off — prayed while they were on the phone. Just crazy. Just ridiculous.”
She learned to say the funerals herself, after being rebuffed by preachers and priests too many times. Even so, she said she never doubted what she was doing. “It never made me question my faith at all,” she said. “I knew that what I was doing was right, and I knew that I was doing what God asked me. It wasn’t a voice from the sky. I knew deep in my soul.”
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no subject
Date: 2015-10-09 03:35 pm (UTC)In my family, one of the rules is "Family comes first!" Kin is kin, and you look out for your kin, no matter what.
And as for those "clergymen"---words absolutely fail me. I'm an atheist, but I respect clergy who do their duty even in trying circumstances. That priest who got sainted after living with and ministering to the lepers in Hawaii, and that other priest who was martyred in Auschwitz after volunteering to take the place of another man, would absolutely spit on those guys.