In a private cemetery in small-town Arkansas, a woman single-handedly buried and gave funerals to more than 40 gay men during the height of the AIDS epidemic, when their families wouldn’t claim them.
–Source
One person who found the courage to push the wheel is Ruth Coker Burks. Now a grandmother living a quiet life in Rogers, in the mid-1980s Burks took it as a calling to care for people with AIDS at the dawn of the epidemic, when survival from diagnosis to death was sometimes measured in weeks. For about a decade, between 1984 and the mid-1990s and before better HIV drugs and more enlightened medical care for AIDS patients effectively rendered her obsolete, Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She had no medical training, but she took them to their appointments, picked up their medications, helped them fill out forms for assistance, and talked them through their despair. Sometimes she paid for their cremations. She buried over three dozen of them with her own two hands, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.
How have I never heard of this?
People like her should be remembered. And even more importantly, we must remember that there was a time in our history when we needed someone like her.
“When Burks was a girl, she said, her mother got in a final, epic row with Burks’ uncle. To make sure he and his branch of the family tree would never lie in the same dirt as the rest of them, Burks said, her mother quietly bought every available grave space in the cemetery: 262 plots. They visited the cemetery most Sundays after church when she was young, Burks said, and her mother would often sarcastically remark on her holdings, looking out over the cemetery and telling her daughter: ‘Someday, all of this is going to be yours.’
‘I always wondered what I was going to do with a cemetery,’ she said. ‘Who knew there’d come a time when people didn’t want to bury their children?’"
Epic Grudge-holding Mom has Epically Empathetic Daughter.
She did good work.
Just to add to this, there is currently a GoFundMe page dedicated to raising money for a memorial to be placed in Files Cemetery dedicated to those whom she cared for, and those who lost their lives to the epidemic.
“Someday,” she said, “I’d love to get a monument that says: This is what
happened. In 1984, it started. They just kept coming and 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.“
Some assholes have been putting nails in cheese and treats in dog parks in Chicago and Massachusetts. Also adding antifreeze to water bowls.
Please watch out for your dogs. And if you find out the address of someone doing this, give me the address and tell no one. I will disembowel them.
Antifreeze is fucking deadly as shit. Whilst my mom worked in the vets office the neighbor of a cat owner had become sick of his neighbors tom spraying by his house so he left antifreeze out for the cat. Animals are weirdly attracted to the smell and will drink it.
The cat was given to the vets and for 2 days it’s insides were slowly dissolved by the acids and it bled from his nose, mouth and even eyes.
On the second day, the vet not being able to help and refusing to let the cat suffer any longer put the cat down. The neighbor who did not deny his crimes didn’t even offer to pay the woman’s vet bill.
SO THE BIGGEST FUCKING SIGNAL BOOST TO THIS POST.
Fuck who ever is doing this. They can fucking burn.
my friend had a cat and it drank antifreeze that was puddled in the driveway and one day they were knitting and it just vomited up all of its internal organs and fell over dead on her lap.
The perpetrators of all of this will burn in Hell.
A neighbor of mine threw a ball of hamburger full of rat poison pellets over our fence for my son’s dog. He survived, barely, but has had nerve damage ever since.
Okay, listen up, if your pet drinks antifreeze, do you know what the cure is? Alcohol. That’s right. To save your furry little friend you have to get them drunk out of their faces. Antifreeze is an inhibitor and stops your enzymes from working, but luckily alcohol stops that from happening. I learned this from my A Level Biology lessons, but here’s a source anyway http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/2617997.stm
Shit this is important SIGNAL BOOST THIS THANK YOU ALICE
BOOST. FUCKING BOOST.
ALWAYS REBLOG
not blog related, but I’m not an asshole
S I G N A L
B O O S T
keep your animal friends safe.
Even a Beholder wouldn’t do this. Signal Boost
I would not hesitate to drop anyone who would do this into the earth, s i g n a l b o o s t
Signal boost
This applies to humans, too.
The first choice is fomepizole, but a lot of vets don’t keep it in stock.
Barring that, clear alcohols like vodka or everclear are a standard treatment for methanol or ethylene glycol poisoning
May the 10 of Pentacles bless your account with more money than you can spend. 💵✨
10 of Pentz came thruuu
Omg this actually works!!! Thank you 10 of Pentacles!!!
I could seriously use this money right now….
Please give me my refund of 400$ soon…
I feel obligated to reblog this every time it shows up in my dash
No bragging, just 100% floored and grateful. Work hard, maintain a positive attitude, and believe that anything can happen.
So I reblogged this exactly a week ago because I thought it was funny and uh lo and behold, a family friend wrote me a big ol’ check just to help me out of a tough financial spot AND my bank refunded me $32 for fees they’d originally taken out. SO UH YEAH. Reblogging this again in hopes that it brings equally good fortune to my followers.
Sure why not? Jobs bring in money and prosperity…
I NEED TO FIX MY CAR DOOR
It fucking WORKED.
give me money
i can’t afford to breathe
I just need a few more money to get the things I need for a project!!! Come through pentacles dude!!!!
Still waiting for that first universal credit payment.
In response to the NSFW ban being enacted by Tumblr Staff, on December 17th 2018 I propose that we all log off of our Tumblr accounts for 24 hours.
The lack of respect and communication between staff and users is stark. Users have been begging staff to delete the porn bot outbreak, which has plagued the website for well over a year. The porn bots oftentimes send people asks and messages, trying to get them to go to a website full of viruses. They also spam advertisements on others posts.
Users have also begged that Tumblr ban neo-nazis, child porn, and pedophiles, all which run rampant on the site. The site/app got so bad that it was taken off the app store.
However, instead of answering the users, Tumblr has instead taken the liberty to ban all NSFW content, regardless of age. But users have already run into issues of their SFW content being marked as sensitive and being flagged as NSFW, not allowing them to share their work.
Not only does this discriminate again content creators, but it also discriminates against sex workers. Disgustingly, the ban will be enacted on December 17 which is also International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.
This ban is disgusting, and while I (and plenty of others) welcome porn bots and child porn being banned, the Tumblr filtration system is broken. It tags artistic work’s nipples as NSFW (when it is art), it tags SFW art as NSFW (when it is not), and does not stop the porn bots, neo-nazis and dozens of other issues.
This ban is discriminatory. This ban is ineffective. This ban is unacceptable.
To protest, log off of your Tumblr account for the entirety of November 17th. Log off at 12 am EST or 9PM PST and stay off for 24 hours. Don’t post. Don’t log on. Don’t even visit the website. Don’t give them that sweet ad revenue.
Tumblr’s stock has already taken a hard hit. Let’s make it tank. Maybe then they will listen to the users.
Pansexual Monster Girl 
