Billy Graham: Unrest over final resting place

MONTREAT, N.C. — It is a struggle worthy of the Old Testament, pitting brother against brother, son against mother, and leaving the famous father, the Rev. Billy Graham, trapped in the middle, pondering what to do.

Retired and almost blind at 88, the evangelist is sitting in his modest log house on an isolated mountaintop in western North Carolina and listening to a family friend describe where Franklin Graham, heir to his father's worldwide ministry, wants to bury his parents.

Billy's wife, Ruth Bell Graham, is listening too, curled up in a hospital bed. At 86 years old and 100 pounds, she suffers from degeneration of the spine, which keeps her in constant pain. In a nightgown, quilted pink silk bed jacket and pearl earrings, she stares up at the longtime friend on her right, her face and mind alert. On her left sits her younger son, Ned, 48, who has taken care of her and Billy for almost four years, and Ned's wife, Christina.

The visitor, crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, is talking about a memorial "library" that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA), headed by Franklin, is building in Charlotte. Cornwell toured the building site and saw the proposed burial plot. She was asked by Ned, who opposes Franklin's choice, to come and give his father her impression.

"I was horrified by what I saw," she tells Billy, in the presence of a reporter invited to be there.

The building, designed in part by consultants who used to work for Walt Disney Co., is not a library, she says, but a large barn and silo — a reminder of Billy Graham's early childhood on a dairy farm near Charlotte. Once it's completed in the spring, visitors will pass through a 40-foot-high glass entry cut in the shape of a cross and be greeted by a mechanical talking cow. They will follow a path of straw past multimedia exhibits. At the end of the tour, they will be pointed toward a stone walk, also in the shape of a cross, that leads to a garden where the bodies of Billy and Ruth Graham could lie.

Throughout the tour, there will be several opportunities for people to put their names on a mailing list.

"The whole purpose of this evangelistic experience is fund-raising," Cornwell says to Billy Graham. "I know who you are, and you are not that place. It's a mockery. People are going to laugh. Please don't be buried there."

Billy Graham's eyes never leave Cornwell's face as she talks.

"It's a circus," Ruth says at one point, softly. "A tourist attraction."

Ruth Graham has told her children that she doesn't want to be buried in Charlotte. She has a burial spot picked out in the mountains where she raised five children, and she hopes her husband will join her there.

Ned Graham has been working to convince his three sisters, Gigi, Bunny and Anne, that their mother's wishes should be followed.

But six years ago, Franklin, 54, took over the BGEA and now is trying to convince their dad of the appropriateness of the Charlotte burial site, Ned and another family member say.

Franklin, in a telephone interview, says no decision has been made. "Some of the board members feel the library ought to be the place," he said, declining to name which members. "I'm preparing both places."

Of the library, he said, "I wanted to show to another generation of pastors and evangelists what God did through a man who was faithful and who communicated it simply."

After Cornwell finishes, Ned Graham speaks to his father.

"Could you see going to a Ronald Reagan library and there not be one book?" he asks. "Or people being solicited to be on a donor list?" He wipes his eyes; his mother, tissue in hand, wipes hers.

The burial issue threatens to tear asunder what some have called the royal family of American religion, and Billy is being asked to make a Solomon-like choice between the wishes of his heir and his wife of 63 years.

The preacher's wife

According to those who know her, Ruth Bell Graham has always spoken her mind. When she and Billy married in 1943, Ruth, raised by Presbyterian missionaries in China, told her husband, a Southern Baptist, that she would remain a Presbyterian. When Billy announced in 1947 that he wanted to become a full-time traveling evangelist, she insisted that they settle in Montreat, a hamlet in the Blue Ridge Mountains, so that she and the children could be near family.

Graham drew record crowds to his Billy Graham Crusades and became so popular that between 1950 and 1990, he appeared on the Gallup Organization's "Most Admired" list more often than any other American.

He traveled as much as six months at a time, and while he was away, Ruth was raising their children in a log house. Her children say she was fearless and fun, a mom who thought nothing of chopping off the heads of rattlesnakes or driving a motocross bike into a split-rail fence when she realized she didn't know how to stop it.

As teenagers, the children struggled with the expectations that come with being a preacher's kids. Both boys, Franklin and Ned, fell in love with fast cars, drinking and girls and were no strangers to the local police. Eventually, however, four of the children started their own ministries, the largest of which is Franklin's international relief agency, Samaritan's Purse.

Though initially, according to family members and news reports, Billy and several other BGEA board members had reservations about Franklin succeeding his father because of his limited experience, in 1995 the board named Franklin vice chairman.

The Charlotte site

Franklin persuaded the BGEA board to move the organization from its longtime headquarters in Minneapolis to Charlotte, near where Billy Graham was born. It was a logical choice, and not just for nostalgic reasons: Charlotte's business elite had always been big supporters of the Billy Graham Crusades, raising as much as $1 million for the preaching tour each time it came to town.

Franklin Graham and Graeme Keith, a major developer in Charlotte and a BGEA board member, began envisioning a Billy Graham memorial that might attract 200,000 or more tourists to Charlotte.

In 2001, the organization purchased 63 acres adjacent to a major highway for $7.4 million. In 2005, the new corporate headquarters was completed, a 200,000-square-foot building of fieldstone, cedar and glass costing almost $44 million. Then Franklin turned his attention to the memorial library.

The library was, by all accounts, not something his father initially wanted. In fact, Billy Graham abstained when the board first voted on the idea. But eventually, convinced by Franklin and others that this new building would perpetuate the Gospel after he died, Billy gave it his blessing.

The 40,000-square-foot structure has a high-pitched roof supported by unfinished wooden beams, and bathroom stalls of corrugated tin. The tour is geared particularly to children, Franklin said, starting with the life-size mechanical Holstein named Bessie that will greet visitors from her stall just inside the front door.

Franklin says the library also will house some of his father's writings and memorabilia taken from The Cove, another piece of BGEA property about 100 miles west of Charlotte in Asheville. As it turns out, that is where his mother wants to be buried.

The 1,500-acre Billy Graham Training Center at the Cove was Ruth's project from its beginning in 1984. She believed that people working hard for Christ needed a place where they could idle in a rocking chair, stare at the mountains, and find new energy to continue their work.

A small library was established there, and as years went by, books given to Billy, inscribed by the world leaders who wrote them, found their way there. Glass cabinets today display some of the thousands of gifts he received.

In his early years on the BGEA board, Franklin directed millions of dollars to The Cove, which is 18 miles from Montreat. But once plans for the new library in Charlotte were under way, he turned to the Cove for money. The BGEA sold its 300-acre campground, transferred money earned from the Cove's endowment to the library's endowment, and laid off Cove staff.

The Cove location

When Ruth was supervising construction at The Cove, she paid particular attention to the chapel, a spare yet elegant stone edifice. She arranged six arched, clear glass windows on each side of the sanctuary so that visitors would always see outside. She asked that the floors be made of native pine and the chandeliers of cast iron from Asheville.

A few hundred yards from the chapel is the quiet, leafy spot where Ruth intends to be buried. Her desire might have remained just a preference communicated to a couple of her children had Ned Graham and Patricia Cornwell not acted.

After learning from Ned about the Charlotte plans, Cornwell retrieved a letter, mailed to her several months earlier, asking for a donation to the new library and signed by Billy Graham. She had been puzzled because Billy didn't write fund-raising letters. She decided to fly to Charlotte.

Board member Graeme Keith took her on a tour of the barn. She was impressed by the TV footage of Billy over the years. But a talking cow?

"It truly is tacky," she said.

She asked Keith about the mailing list. He told her that traditional donors were aging and that younger donors were needed. He also said the names of big donors would be inscribed on the concrete silo.

Keith told her that Billy and Ruth were going to be buried on the property. The tour, he said, would end at their graves.

Cornwell recalled, "I asked, 'How do Billy and Ruth feel about this?' "

Keith told her that Billy had agreed. And Ruth? Billy was working on her, Keith said.

Cornwell then visited Montreat to ask Ruth where she wanted to be buried. Ruth repeated her position. That's when Ned Graham decided he needed to get a notarized statement, which his mother dictated and signed in front of six witnesses.

"My Final Wishes Concerning My Burial Site" says, in part: "Since it is impossible for me to be buried at my 'first home' in China, my next choice is the beautiful mountains of Western North Carolina which I have loved and where I have lived for the past 60 years."

A number of years ago, the document continues, she and Billy "agreed that we would be buried together near the chapel at The Cove. The Memorial Garden at Chatlos Chapel was prepared for that very purpose. My final wish is to be buried at The Cove. Under no circumstances am I to be buried in Charlotte, North Carolina."

In an interview with The Washington Post, Keith said, "Ruth wants to be buried next to Billy, first and foremost." When asked about her objections to Charlotte, he replied, "In her physical condition, she agrees with the last person who talked to her."

Personality matter

Franklin knew where his mother wanted to be buried but until recently never talked to her about his plans, leaving that to his father.

It was not the first time he and his mother had seen things differently. By his own admission, he was always a headstrong child. Once, Ruth, fed up with the teenage Franklin's smoking, made him smoke an entire pack of cigarettes. He vomited a half-dozen times but never gave in. On another occasion, Ruth, angry at Franklin's pinching his sisters in the car while on a trip to a fast-food restaurant, locked him in the trunk. When she opened it up, he asked for a cheeseburger without meat, French fries and a Coke.

Ned, six years younger than Franklin and the baby of the family, was the quieter child. He says he was spoiled, and he wonders whether his siblings resent him for that.

That's not to say that, on occasion, he didn't give Ruth fits. "In my late teens, early 20s maybe, I'd be out late drinking, getting stoned. I'd come home at 2 or so and Mother would be up. She'd just kiss me and say, 'Ned, I'm glad you're home. Love ya, I'm going to bed now.' "

Now, he says, it's his turn to take care of his mother. Two years ago, his wife assumed the daily operation of their East Gate Ministries, a Bible and training ministry in China, so that he could return to Montreat. He found his mother severely undernourished, he says, and his father's health also deteriorating. He had the house adjusted to make it easier for his father to walk around, started his mother on a special diet and made sure she visited the beauty salon once a week.

As he heard reports this fall about the library from his sisters, he said, he grew concerned that it would belittle his father's ministry. His brother dismissed his concerns.

"I've spent the last few years trying to help my parents preserve their mental acuity, independence and dignity," Ned said. "And I'm saddened that the family is not unified on this issue."

He knows his father hates conflict, which is one reason his dad has stayed away from the political battles of religious conservatives. But this is one dispute Billy Graham can't avoid.

As Cornwell ends her short speech to Billy that November evening, Billy says, "I sure appreciate what you say, and I have no comment. I've heard all this before."

Cornwell is not dissuaded. "I tell you, if you're buried there I'll dig you up and move you here," she says.

Ruth chuckles from her bed. "I'll be one of the pallbearers," she says.

At the sound of Ruth's voice, Billy's face softens toward Cornwell, as he says, "I'll just think and pray about what you've said."