Chicago Tribune - June 22, 2003
Patrick Kampert, Tribune staff reporter

In 1988, Walt and Terry Rucker were in their early 40s with their only child finishing up high school, living in a house purchased for its empty-nester appeal.

Fifteen years later, the Ruckers have moved to a bigger house in Chicago's Ravenswood neighborhood, one with a large playset in the back, and through the years have taken in nine children born to moms with AIDS or HIV, adopting five of them.

What happened?

"It kind of snuck up on us," Walt said.

"I think when you're doing what you're supposed to be doing, you know it's right," Terry said. "You just feel it."

"It" began like this: Terry was a hospice nurse who signed on when the hospital she worked at began an AIDS unit. There, Terry befriended Emilia, 38, a grandmother dying of the disease. She had no place to go, so the Ruckers took her in.

"They expected her to live no more than a month," Terry said.

But she lived six months.

"Once she was out of the hospital and treated not as though she were dying but treated as though she was expected to do for herself a little bit, a lot of her sick behaviors stopped," said Walt, a 59-year-old psychologist. "She got up, started walking around, doing things, cooking. She was very active until the last two days."

After Emilia died, the Ruckers became licensed as foster-care providers after seeing a TV news report about children with AIDS needing homes.

"I told the social worker, 'Now, we don't want to adopt anybody. We're just going to take them in temporarily,'" Walt said. "They were supposed to come to us until their parents got their act together or until they died."

So much for plans

It didn't work that way. Although a few children were placed with the Ruckers for a very short period, nine made the place their home: Tony, Jermaro, Jessica, Faith, Jackie, Dakota, Ernest, Daisy and Tezzie. (The names of Jackie and Ernest have been changed for privacy reasons.)

Jackie, Ernest and Tezzie now live elsewhere but still visit. The Ruckers adopted 12-year-old Dakota, 11-year-old Jessica and 4-year-old Daisy. And, years ago, before the advent of protease inhibitors (the pharmaceutical cocktail that makes HIV infection more of a chronic disease), Jermaro, Tony and Faith died of complications from AIDS.

The children knew they were dying. Terry remembers being in the cafeteria at Children's Memorial Hospital, taking a napkin and drawing a line down the center. Then she started taking notes at the request of Tony and Faith, who'd been adopted by the Ruckers. The pair began dictating requests for their funerals. But Faith was not happy at all with the items on her brother's side of the napkin.

"He's copying off me!" she stormed.

Terry still has the napkin. At 57, she also has her hands full. Besides the children, there are two dogs and five cats at their home. Dakota's and Jessica's birth mothers occasionally stay with the Ruckers for a week or two to visit their children.

"We have a beautiful family because they kept their kids and tried to do what is right," Terry said. "They have the right to see their kids and be a part of their kids' lives."

A second home

Then there are the visits to Children's Memorial. Even though their mothers have AIDS, Jessica and Daisy do not test positive for HIV; Dakota, however, does. The disease destroyed his kidneys and he was on dialysis before receiving a transplant last year. He also had a bowel perforation that kept him out of school for a year.

A recent spike in Dakota's blood pressure--quite normal for transplant recipients--put him back in the hospital for several days, and the Rucker family in its home away from home.

Dakota spent most of his time in the hospital's teen lounge for patients; Jessica, the social one, made friends with other patients in Dakota's wing, and Daisy tried to take over Dakota's bed and VCR since he didn't seem to be using it. Until he saw Daisy using it and tried to nudge her off the bed, prompting her to push right back.

"Stop, both of you!" scolded Terry.

"I'm marking my territory," responded Dakota.

"You haven't seen that bed all day," Terry said. "Now that she wants it, it's your territory?"

"It's all his fault," Daisy snorted.

Typical kids. And a not-so-typical family, their doctor says.

"These are my saints," said Ram Yogev, medical director of the division of Pediatric and Maternal HIV Infection at Children's Memorial, who has cared for all the Rucker children. "When the first President Bush talked about the people who were a thousand points of light, he never found the Ruckers. They are many times a light for me. If I get discouraged, I look at them and think, 'If they can do it, then I should not give up. I should try harder.'"

The Ruckers would blush at such talk. Though their relationships with most of the birth mothers have been warm, Terry regrets some of her arguments with Jermaro's mom in the early days. Their shared antagonism didn't melt until the families gathered to make his funeral arrangements. (The next year, the mom came to the Rucker home for Thanksgiving.)

'A sense of wonderment'

The Ruckers' oldest daughter, Jennifer, 31, initially wasn't receptive to her parents' calling; they, in turn, wondered why she didn't share their enthusiasm.

"When you're a teenager, you don't really want to be around much anyway," she said. "My parents were upset that I wasn't buying into their plans as strongly and emotionally as they did."

Today, Jennifer is a guidance counselor at Lincoln Park High School and spends a day or two a week during vacations at her parents' house helping out with Dakota, Jessica and Daisy, whom she considers siblings in every sense of the word.

"My parents would love to have me move back into the house," she said, laughing. She says she has "a sense of wonderment" at her parents' new life but still worries about them wearing themselves out.

"My biggest concern has always been their age," Jennifer said. "They're still raising young children at an age when a lot of people are grandparents."

A devastating split

Bringing children with an infectious disease into their lives has not been without its social costs. The Ruckers have been estranged from close relatives who didn't want their children playing with the adoptees. In 1990, they had a falling-out with their AIDS-ignorant church, which didn't want Tony in its Sunday school. The story made front-page news; the church backed down.

Terry describes herself as a fundamentalist Christian, but she has not been back to church since, though she does send the children to Ravenswood Baptist Church.

"It was really devastating for her," Jennifer Rucker said. "Other churches reached out to them and said, 'We heard about what happened and we'd like to invite you to be part of our congregation.' But my mom never recovered."

Terry cast off other facets of her previous life with less regret. She was an accomplished weaver with a business of her own in Rochester, N.Y., before she and Walt moved to Chicago and she decided to attend nursing school.

"I just loved to weave but it didn't feel right to me," she said. "I didn't feel like I was giving anything to others."

Her creations were old-fashioned and finely detailed, 45 threads to the inch, and it would often take three days just to thread the loom. The linens and tablecloths were traditional and symmetrical. Now, she and Walt are weaving a non-traditional family, an endeavor that is noisy, messy and not at all symmetrical. And loving it.

Daisy sneaked up on Walt at the dining room table and gripped him in a hug.

"Gotcha," she said.

"Yep," he agreed, smiling. "You got me."

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