Ruth Graham; Evangelist's Wife Led Private Crusade

"The fiber of her being was formed out of watching starvation," said Brenda Josee, an editor who worked with Mrs. Graham on her books.

As a young girl watching her parents toil together in China, she began to envision what it would be like to work alongside a husband on a mission that mattered. She met Graham in 1940 at Wheaton College, a small Christian school near Chicago. To her delight, he was an ordained minister and as serious about God as she was. To her dismay, he was determined to spread the word of God in this country, not overseas.

She wanted to be a missionary in Tibet and held to those plans during a long and rocky courtship. Ultimately, however, she was persuaded to marry him -- and his ministry -- but it was not an easy choice.

"After the joy and satisfaction of knowing that I am his by rights and his forever, I will slip into the background," she wrote in her journal, according to the biography "Ruth: A Portrait" (1998) by Patricia Cornwell. "In short, be a lost life. Lost in Bill's."

No one who knew Mrs. Graham would have ever called her lost. She was a finder and restorer of lost souls, including her children. Without a father's regular presence, they gave her fits as they grew up. "Home life was not easy and not always smooth," said William Martin, a sociologist and biographer of Billy Graham.

Ned and his older brother, Franklin, were particularly troublesome, smoking, drinking, racing cars and chasing girls. Mrs. Graham's motherly way, when they dragged home early in the morning, was not to chastise but to let them know that she had stayed up and prayed for them.

"She trusted God would take care of them," said Jean Ford, Billy Graham's sister. All five of Billy and Ruth's children went into some form of ministry, including Franklin, who assumed his father's role as chief executive of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. And all five -- Anne and Virginia as well as Franklin, Ned and Ruth -- were with her when she died, according to an association spokesman. Mrs. Graham is also survived by 19 grandchildren and a number of great-grandchildren.

In the early 1960s, Mrs. Graham took charge of the Sunday school class at Montreat-Anderson College. The college, Cornwell wrote, "was known as the place where you go if you can't go anywhere else. A sizable band of society's rebels, along with those afflicted by academic indolence, landed there."

The students loved their pretty, smart teacher and responded to her social causes, which included helping the poor and running street meetings. The college chaplain asked her at one point whether she wouldn't prefer to spend her free time helping people in the mainstream.

"Well, God loves these people, too," she said. "Just because they're unattractive or warped in their thinking doesn't mean the Lord doesn't love them. And if we don't take them, who is going to take them?"

"Her greatest gift was her uncanny ability to be kind without making you feel you needed it," said Cornwell, who, through much of her adolescence, received assistance and love from Mrs. Graham.

Mrs. Graham had a way with spirited people because she was one. Several years ago, while in Milwaukee visiting her grandchildren, she decided she wanted to make the little ones a zip line to swing on. She strung thin wire between two trees 100 feet apart, attached eye hooks to a coat hanger and then to the wire.

She figured she ought to try it out first, and when she did, the wire snapped, sending her sailing and into a hospital with multiple injuries. Those injuries resulted eventually in the osteoarthritis that confined her to bed for the past few years.

She was so spunky that her husband's handlers were never sure whether it was a good thing when she agreed to accompany him on outings. At a political rally in 1975, just as President Gerald Ford was about to speak, she got up from her seat, grabbed a war protester's sign, sat back down and slipped the sign under her white pumps. She told the media, "The man had every right to his opinion. But when the president of the United States is speaking, it is definitely not the place to express his opinion."

The protester filed charges against her for assault, and newspapers carried photographs of the Rev. Graham's wife being hauled into court. Charges were dropped after the protester admitted that Mrs. Graham had done nothing but pat his shoulder.

By far, Mrs. Graham's largest undertaking, other than her family, was the creation of the Billy Graham Training Center, known as "the Cove," beginning in 1984.

She worked with architects and construction engineers as classrooms, auditoriums, accommodations and a stone chapel took shape in forests of poplar, locust and Southern pine. It was her wish, stated repeatedly and written in a notarized statement, to be buried at the Cove. Her husband agreed with her until this year, when son Franklin opened a memorial library in Charlotte 100 miles away, near his father's original home.

Franklin suggested that his parents be buried in Charlotte, setting off a fight among the siblings that he appears to have won. This week, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association released a statement saying that Ruth and Billy Graham had agreed to be buried at the new library -- her wish lost in his.