Wife of Evangelist Billy Graham Dies

Jun 15, 05:00 AM

Current Headlines: By Cathy Lynn Grossman

Ruth Graham, who gave her husband, Billy Graham, the freedom to roam the world and become its best-known evangelist while she reared their five children, died Thursday, four days after her 87th birthday.

Her family was at her bedside in the Montreat, N.C., mountaintop cabin she designed 62 years ago.

"Ruth was my life partner, and we were called by God as a team," Billy Graham, 88, said in a statement. "She was a vital and integral part of our ministry, and my work through the years would have been impossible without her encouragement and support."

"She was the greatest Christian I ever knew," Graham said.

In a statement, President Bush praised Ruth Graham as "a remarkable woman of faith whose life was defined by her belief in a personal, loving and gracious God." Bush said "she inspired people around the world with her humor, intelligence, elegance and kindness."

Throughout her last years, bedridden with painful degenerative osteoarthritis in her spine, her prayer was never for herself. It was, "God's will be done and God's name glorified," she told USA TODAY in 2005.

She wrote more than a dozen Christian inspirational books and shared with her husband in receiving the Congressional Gold Medal in 1996 for their contributions "to morality, racial equality, family and religion."

Yet she may have been best known as the matriarch of America's most famous Christian family, a woman who was feisty, energetic and utterly faithful to Jesus and Billy.

"I once saw a PBS special on Mom that never mentioned Jesus. It captured her personality but missed who she truly is," said daughter Anne Graham Lotz, an author and teacher.

Ruth Bell, born in China to missionary parents and educated in a Christian boarding school in what is now North Korea, met the lanky Billy Graham when both were students at Wheaton College. They married in 1943, after graduation.

Daughters Virginia (Gigi) Graham Tchividjian and Ruth Graham write inspirational books. Older son Franklin Graham has taken over the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and son Nelson Edman (Ned) Graham has worked distributing Bibles in China.

In 2005, when Billy was no longer able to carry on his evangelistic crusades, he retired to Ruth's bedside.

"He would just sit and stare at her. It made her a little uncomfortable, but you could see she loved it, see the tenderness in her sparkling eyes," Lotz said.

"She loved excitement," Lotz said, and she tried to learn to ride a motorcycle, but she "drove straight into a lake and got fished out by a trucker."

She didn't fear dying. Ruth once mused to Decision magazine, "I wonder if (God is) excited when one of his children is coming home -- it's not a stranger coming home, it's a loved child." (c) Copyright 2005 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.