Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1991. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
The Miami Herald, Inc.; Tuesday, December 10, 1991
Lori Rozsa, Herald Staff Writer
A closed casket, white tinged with pink, encased the woman whose suffering made her a reluctant martyr for a nation coming to grips with a deadly epidemic.
The gaunt, sunken-eyed Kimberly of her recent photos was forgotten temporarily at her wake. Instead, a pastel drawing of Kimberly, who died in her sleep Sunday morning, rested on an easel near the casket in the chapel of St. Anastasia Catholic Church in Fort Pierce.
The drawing is of the healthy Kimberly with long wavy hair and a beatific smile. "She was a beautiful person," said Vickie Guettler, principal of St. Anastasia School and a Bergalis family friend for 11 years. "Her spirit, her love always showed through. She was brave . . . "
Bergalis was the first person believed to have contracted AIDS from a health-care worker, her dentist, Dr. David Acer, who died in 1990. Bergalis, diagnosed with AIDS in 1989, decided to go public after Acer died and the Centers for Disease Control told her she probably got HIV from him.
On Monday, two of the other four Acer patients who apparently contracted HIV from him, paid their respects. Richard Driskell and his family sat in a back pew. Barbara Webb, a 65-year-old retired teacher who became Kimberly's close friend, laid her hands on the casket and shook her head. Bergalis died a few hours after her parents put her to bed Sunday. George and Anna Bergalis and their surviving children, Allison, 20, and Sondra, 12, sat in a front pew.
The Rev. Mark Christopher got smiles from many of the 750 in the church when he presented items that helped define Kimberly: a Gator T-shirt, she was 1989 graduate of the University of Florida; sketches she made in high school; and an art book and a calculus textbook -- she wanted to be an actuary but she also enjoyed drawing. The Rev. Christopher held up a small wooden Christmas tree he gave her a few days before she died and a bell she used to ring for help after she could no longer speak.
Altar boys laid the items on the casket along with here favorite Teddy bear, a white one with a green and red hat. The bear plays We Wish You a Merry Christmas when its back is pressed.
"Kimberly loved Christmas, and she loved this Teddy bear -- a simple child," Christopher said. "Put them all together, and you'll find Kimberly Bergalis was no different than we are. She was loving. She had ambitions. She wanted to be someone. She turned out to be a great person."
A screen was set up next to the podium to the Bette Midler song Wind Beneath My Wings and slides of Kimberly were projected: a toddler on a donkey, a proud little girl holding her newborn sister Sondra, a vivacious high-schooler posing in her prom dress, and the thinner, paler Kimberly of 1989.
Her family and many others wept as the images flashed by.
Printed in the prayer booklet handed out were notes Kimberly wrote Oct. 31, 1990, after she visited a 25-year-old man dying of cancer. She was still relatively healthy, she felt lucky.
"After visiting him, I cried and cried," she wrote. "Here was this boy -- only a few years older than me -- who is suffering and in so much pain. What kind of world do we live in? Why was he chosen to be deprived of a happy, pain-free life? There are so many things that don't make sense."
CAPTION: PHOTO Anna and George Bergalis sit in front pew at church services (KIMBERLY BERGALIS)
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