Billy Graham's sons feud over his final resting place

Wife calls it circus, prefers mountains

MONTREAT -- 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 a 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 on this bleak November evening. At 86 years and 100 pounds, she suffers from degeneration of the spine, which keeps her in constant pain. In a nightgown 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 four years, and Ned's wife, Christina.

Events will unfold quickly in the days afterward: more meetings, prayers and a notarized document that Ruth signed before six witnesses.

But at this moment everyone's attention is on the visitor, crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, who is talking about a memorial library that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, 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 give his father her impression.

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

Touring the library

The building, designed in part by consultants who used to work for the Walt Disney Co., is not a library, she says, but a large barn and silo -- a reminder of Billy Graham's 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 through rooms full of 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 fundraising," 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. Ruth Graham sighs. A lot.

"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 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 persuade his sisters, Gigi, Bunny and Anne, to follow their mother's wishes.

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 says.

Franklin says no decision has been made. "Some of the board members feel the library ought to be the place," he says, 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.