The Miami Herald, Inc.; Friday, December 13, 1991
Lori Rozsa, Herald Staff Writer

In a small cemetery on a wooded hill in the heart of coal country, the 23-year-old AIDS victim who died Sunday was laid to rest under a cascade of pink roses, white carnations and yellow chrysanthemums.

As the first person to contract AIDS from a health care procedure -- the Centers for Disease Control told her she almost certainly got the AIDS virus from her dentist, Dr. David Acer -- Bergalis represented a new and frightening aspect of AIDS.

She became the strident spokeswoman for a controversial cause, the mandatory testing of health care workers and patients. She traveled to Washington, D.C., three months ago to testify on behalf of the Bergalis Bill.

The bill, which would require doctors who perform invasive procedures to be tested for HIV, is still stuck in the same committee before which she testified and isn't likely to get passed anytime soon.

The dying woman unabashedly sought to turn the sympathy and publicity she generated into support for mandatory testing. So the nation and the world followed Bergalis through the painful stages of AIDS, as the virus transformed the vibrant young college graduate into an infirm, mute skeleton of a human being.

The people of Tamaqua turned out for her final homecoming, grim as it was. More than 200 people in this small town of 8,500 attended the midday funeral.

"It's such a shame," 76-year-old Sylvester Dallas said, watching Kimberly's parents and two sisters follow the white and pink coffin out of the St. Peter and St. Paul Catholic Church on Pine Street, not far from where she grew up. "She was such a pretty, intelligent girl. It's a shame she had to die the way she did."

Her parents, usually ready to speak about her cause, were silent Thursday. They shook hands with old friends and accepted the condolences of well-meaning strangers. But they gave no press conference, answered no questions. George and Anna Bergalis sat, gripping each other's hands, at the graveside. Their surviving daughters, 20-year-old Allison and 12-year-old Sondra, sat beside them. The brave effort to fight back tears in front of dozens of cameras was lost when the Rev. William Linkchorst blessed the casket with holy water for the last time.

"She had beauty, wisdom and courage," Linkchorst said. "She is at rest now."

The Bergalis family left Tamaqua -- an Indian word meaning land of the running waters -- for Fort Pierce in 1978, when Kimberly was in junior high. She didn't want to leave. She wrote friends often and visited. Her last visit was in February, when she was strong enough to ski on a nearby mountain and visit her grandparents.

That journey had a somber purpose, too. "She came to the cemetery," said family friend Marie Terry. "She wanted to see where her place would be. She wanted to remember what it was like."

Her spot in the three-acre Lithuanian Cemetery on Owl Creek Road overlooks dozens of stolid, unadorned headstones. She's at the top of a knoll, facing a mountain thick with oak, maple and pine. Deer graze between the tombstones at night. In the spring, a blanket of wild rhododendron brightens the hillside with thousands of pink flowers.

The nearest sign of commerce is a Christmas tree farm a mile down the road.

John Trudich, who like most of his townsfolk followed the Bergalis story with shock and sympathy, thought about what Kimberly might like as he dug her grave Tuesday night.

"Everybody feels so sorry for her. It's a terrible thing," Trudich said as he watched the big TV satellite trucks lumber down the winding road from the graveyard. "But it's nice that they brought her back home."

CAPTION: PHOTO BERGALIS family; photo: Kimberly BERGALIS

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