AP Features, June 16th, 2007
Reflecting her simple tastes, a plywood casket carried Ruth Bell Graham through the streets of her mountainside home Saturday as mourners gathered to remember the wife of evangelist Billy Graham.
Ruth Graham died Thursday at the age of 87, following a lengthy illness that left her bedridden for months. She fell into a coma on Wednesday following a recent bout with pneumonia, and a spokesman said she died peacefully with her husband and all five of her children at her bedside.
All her children planned to speak at an afternoon memorial service. North Carolina Senator Elizabeth Dole was scheduled to attend, along with Lynda Johnson Robb, the daughter of the late President Lyndon Johnson, and Steve Case, co-founder of AOL.
Born in 1920 to medical missionaries in China, and spending some of her high school years in what is now North Korea, Ruth Graham vowed never to marry and dreamed of working as a missionary in Tibet.
That changed after she met Billy Graham at college in Illinois. The couple married in 1943.
"There is so much scandal in religion _ particularly in the evangelical realm," said Ruth Gleeson, 56, of nearby Black Mountain. "For her, it was never about the ego. It was always about God. That's really a rarity, and we have to honor that."
Graham will be buried in the prayer garden at the new Billy Graham Library in Charlotte.
Billy Graham, who preached to more than 210 million people around the world during a six-decade career in the pulpit, was not scheduled to speak Saturday. He has several ailments, including prostate cancer and Parkinson's disease, and is largely confined to the home he shared with Ruth.
"In her last days, she talked repeatedly of heaven, and although I will miss her more than I can possibly say, I rejoice that some day soon we will be reunited in the presence of the Lord she loved and served so faithfully," Graham said Friday.
