Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

by Patricia Cornwell

  It was unfortunate that as Billy’s demands took him farther away, Ruth’s private world continued to empty, threatening to leave her alone in a tiny mountain town that originally had drawn her to prevent just that. Her mountaintop house seemed to echo with voices gone and rooms no longer lived in. Her parents were also failing rapidly.

  In 1972, Mrs. Bell was eighty and almost blind with inoperable cataracts. An unsuccessful hip replacement had virtually crippled her. A stroke had left her speech tortured, her mind substituting letters and words for ones she wished to use. It became almost impossible to understand what she said, and she measured her days by the pain and frustration she suffered. Though she rarely complained to others, the truth showed when she would scrawl comments in her diaries, such as “Oh woe It took me more than ten minutes to spell Ruth. Or I can’t read, and I can’t talk.”2

  Dr. Bell was seventy-nine and wracked with pain from an ulcer that had developed between two toes after he bought a three-dollar pair of imitation leather shoes. He was diabetic, and the ulcer would not heal, the pain so acute he could not sleep. In the summer of 1973, he visited the Mayo Clinic and begged the doctors to amputate the infected toe. They advised that his circulation was so poor that they would have to amputate his leg at the hip. He refused. Despite his suffering, he treated his wife like a queen, as she confided in a diary, and led an unusually active life. He never lacked in humor or smiles or tall tales when guests dropped by the shaded old house at the foot of the mountain where the Bells’ famous daughter and son-in-law lived. Dr. Bell took neighborhood kids to baseball games in Asheville and to Sunday dinner at the Battery Park Hotel.

  In 1972, Ruth’s father was elected moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, the highest office that could be held in the denomination and one that had eluded him twice since he had left the mission field.

  “I don’t know if your moderatorship will be able to stem the tide in our church today,” Ruth told him at the time. “But at least for one year our church will get a glimpse of godliness.”

  After serving his one-year term he continued traveling throughout the South to address what he considered to be the growing ills of the Southern Presbyterian Church. A formidable proponent of the Presbyterian tradition of his youth, he was grieved by what he deemed the modern church’s leaning toward humanism. He taught the adult Sunday school class in Montreat, which was broadcast over seven states, and several times each month he flew to Washington, D.C., for Christianity Today board meetings.

  On Sunday, July 8, 1973, he preached at the Swannanoa Presbyterian Church, where he and his wife had first attended when they had moved to Montreat thirty years earlier. Ruth sat beside a window that stretched from eaves to floor. Beyond was the cemetery, lined with the granite markers and monuments of generations. Montreat had no place to bury its dead. Some residents, especially many of the retired missionaries, like her parents, had purchased plots here.

  “I knew as I sat there listening,” Ruth wrote at the time, “watching his loved figure, his white hair, his kindly face, that the next time he came to this church would be in his coffin.”

  Her prediction would soon come to pass. On Wednesday, August 1, she telephoned her parents, offering to bring them supper. They weren’t hungry, they said. She did not see them that day.

  The next morning Mrs. Bell awoke at 7:30. She lay very still, listening for the familiar murmur of the television playing in the living room, for Dr. Bell always got up before she did and turned on the news. The house was silent. She called out to him, lowering herself from her bed to her aluminum walker. Stumbling, almost falling, she made her way across the carpet to his bed. He lay motionless, resting on his left side, his face cradled in his bowed left arm, his right arm comfortably tucked beside his neck. His face was smooth, devoid of the tension of life. She groped for the telephone, stabbing at numbers she was too blind to see, dialing randomly. By chance she reached a neighbor and stammered the frantic words, “Nelson, dead.”

  Mrs. Bell somehow managed to lower herself into her wheelchair and roll into the kitchen. T. W. Wilson was the first to arrive. To his amazement, Mrs. Bell, who had not stood unassisted in three years, was standing beside her wheelchair. She unlocked the kitchen door for him.

  “Nelson … dead,” she whispered.

  Wilson gently helped her back into her bed. Ruth arrived, still in her bathrobe. She kissed her mother and went to her father, gently kissing him, too.

  She sat beside her mother, held her hands and said, “He’s in Heaven now with Nelson Jr.”

  The family doctor arrived, and Calvin Thielman, and Billy. It appeared, the doctor told Billy, that Dr. Bell had died at dawn.

  “That was when he usually got up,” Billy said.

  “And he did,” Ruth added.

  Throughout the day, members of the family flew in from all over the country and gathered at the Bell home to reminisce. Mrs. Bell sat regally in her wheelchair, listening, a solitary tear sliding down her cheek when she thought no one was looking. “Late that night when all was still,” Ruth wrote. “There’s been a lot of laughter…. How can one remember Daddy and not laugh? Humor was as much a part of him as his walk and the tone of his voice. And tears spring unbidden too. I sat briefly on the porch, remembering: his hard work, never complaining, enjoying life, his faithfulness…, his wonderful sense of fun.”

  His children dressed him in the navy blazer and gray slacks they had bought for him when he had been elected moderator, his wire-framed glasses tucked in a pocket. He was buried the next day at 3:00 P.M. on a gentle slope facing east, as thunder rumbled behind the mountains and rain began to fall. “Sitting on the porch tonight listening to the katydids, watching the almost full moon emerge thru the clouds above Rainbow,” Ruth wrote a week later, “it is hard to realize he is gone.”

  Billy and Ruth asked Mrs. Bell to move in with them. At first she refused. Her house held memories. It held objects he had touched. She would not let go. For a while friends spent the night there with her. Sometimes Ruth did, sleeping on her father’s old bed, listening to the various clocks striking out of sync on the half hour throughout the house. She waited for the sounds he had heard, and thought of her mother’s pain.

  “I think losing a loved one,” she wrote in late August, “must be a little like losing a leg. First there is the shock, then the anesthetic, and the pain killers; the attention of doctors and nurses, flowers and cards and visits from friends. But sooner or later you have to learn to walk without it.”

  One day, while she was sorting books and papers in her father’s study, she stumbled across a leather-bound Concordance she had given him years before. Tenderly, she thumbed through it and found jotted inside, in his unmistakable and unreadable scrawl, a prayer list. “Franklin school,” the last item read.

  Had Dr. Bell lived a little longer he would have begun to see his prayers answered, not only about Franklin but also about Ned. Rather than returning to Felsted, Ned was attending a private school in New York, where he excelled in martial arts and made a name for himself as a swimmer. His curiosity was voracious, vacillating from literature to philosophy to science. The turning point for his older brother came in the summer of 1974, when Franklin was twenty-two and was asked to help with the preliminary setup for the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland.

  It had been planned by various international committees, his father the driving force. Every nation had been invited to send its Christian leaders as delegates. Franklin flew to Switzerland and soon found, for the first time, that he was on his own, with no television in his small apartment, no nightlife nearby, no automobile or motorcycle. He began picking up the Bible and reading in the Psalms, Galatians, Ephesians, and Proverbs, developing an unexplainable interest in the words.

  The congress began July 16 with more than four thousand people from more than one hundred fifty nations gathering in the Palais de Beaulieu. Billy arrived, and one night he sat down with Frank
lin for a father-to-son talk.

  “Franklin,” he said, “I don’t know when it will be but I know that at some point the Lord is going to get hold of you. I love you very much, but you are going to have to make a decision. I believe the Lord has something for you to do, but you are going to have to choose Him, and you are going to have to go all the way out for Him. You won’t be able to ride the fence or rock back and forth.”

  Franklin listened to him, really hearing for once, and perhaps just a little fed up with the way he had been living. Several weeks after the conference ended, Franklin traveled to the Middle, East with BGEA team member Roy Gustaf son, a kindly man with a rapier wit who had known Billy for many years. Since his late teens, Franklin had assisted Gustafson in guiding tour groups through the Holy Land.

  Gustafson treated him as though he were a son, sure of his talents, even more certain that the young man was destined to contribute something of significance to the world if he would stop running. Gustafson’s friendship and example left their mark. One day, in his hotel room in Jerusalem, Franklin felt the urge to throw away his cigarettes. Wadding up the package, he tossed it into the trash and knelt beside the bed.

  “I want You to be Lord of my life,” he prayed. “I am willing to give up any area that is not pleasing to You. And I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

  That August, he married Jane Austin Cunningham, who had been his friend and confidante for years. In 1977, almost four years to the day after his grandfather’s death, Franklin would graduate from Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, with a degree in business administration. By 1979 he was president of the Boone-based World Medical Missions Inc. and Samaritan’s Purse, which recruited Christian doctors for short-term service in Third World countries and sent aid to devastated peoples throughout the world. In 1981 he was ordained as a minister, and in 1996, he would take over his father’s ministry.

  Eventually, Ruth would have nineteen grandchildren. To them, she was Tai Tai, Chinese for “Great One,” and visiting her house on the mountain, as Bunny described, “was like going to Disneyland.” Ruth was the ideal grandmother, attentive and, best of all, indulgent. In the same way Billy had let his children break all the rules when he had come home, Ruth threw discipline out the back door when the grandchildren arrived.

  Taught at home that they mustn’t write on themselves, they were dropped off on the mountain and were soon covered with happy faces drawn by their grandmother. Taught at home that they mustn’t get dirty, they were virtually unrecognizable after a day of streaking down the mudslide built by their grandmother, who was usually the first one to try it out. In early October 1974, this playfulness almost ended in tragedy, when Ruth was visiting GiGi, who had recently moved to Milwaukee where her husband was doing graduate work in psychology. Ruth took the grandchildren outside and began rigging up a pipe-slide, a sturdy length of wire threaded through an eight-inch section of pipe.

  She fastened the wire between two trees at a sharp angle. The object was to climb the tree at the highest end of the wire, grip the pipe and slide like James Bond over the yard. Ruth wanted to make sure the contraption was safe and decided to test it first. The wire snapped and she plummeted fifteen feet, her heel striking the hard ground first, then her head. She lay motionless on the grass, and GiGi and the grandchildren thought she was playing possum until their dog licked her face and she didn’t react.

  In the emergency room in Mequon, the doctors could not find a pulse at first. Her left heel was split in five places, and she had a broken rib, a crushed vertebra, and a severe brain concussion. Billy, who had just arrived in Brasilia, received a garbled message that prompted him to conclude that his wife had been critically injured in an automobile accident. He telephoned GiGi, who assured him that Ruth was receiving excellent care. GiGi urged him not to cancel his five-day crusade in Rios Maracaóa Stadium, and he preached to more than half a million people, sick at heart, not knowing if his wife would survive.

  Ruth was in a coma for a week. When she finally regained consciousness, her memory was wiped clean of, among other things, all the Bible verses she had memorized since childhood. Her progress was slow. In October she wrote from GiGi’s home, where she was convalescing, “I have had difficulty reading anything, my Bible included, as my mind just wanders or won’t absorb. I prayed, Lord, take anything from me, but please give me back my Bible verses. Out of the clear blue this verse came to me: ‘I have loved thee with an everlasting love, therefore with loving kindness have I drawn thee.’ ”

  Days later came another, rising out of what seemed a dark side of her mind: “And all of thy children shall be taught of the Lord: and great shall be the peace of thy children.” Others came, unfamiliar verses she had no recollection of ever having read, much less memorized. They seemed to come when she needed them most. While she was recovering, her mother suffered another stroke. Ruth flew home in a private jet, to find her mother in the hospital, miserable and furious. Tubes were in her nose and mouth and she was surrounded by attendants who could not decipher her speech. When a nurse glided in to remove her dentures, Mrs. Bell tried to bite her.

  Ruth persuaded the cardiologist to let her take her mother home, and at dawn on November 8, Virginia Bell died quietly in her own bed, surrounded by family. Ruth attended the funeral, dizzily swinging down the aisle on crutches. Later, she would not recall the service. The deaths of both parents blended into a single hazy event, and it seemed she had endured one interminable suffering.

  According to Mayo Clinic doctors, the fall left Ruth with a mild impairment of short-term memory. It was also probable that the trauma precipitated the various problems she later experienced with the left side of her body, resulting in the replacement of the hip and a portion of the joint in the wrist. Degenerative arthritis in her neck and back, possibly also worsened by the trauma, would eventually lead to the implant of a morphine pump. The procedure was believed to have exposed her to bacterial spinal meningitis, which almost took her life in the early months of 1996.

  The loss of Ruth’s parents left a heartless void she could not fill. Often she lay awake early in the morning, the usual thoughts rising as they had for decades. She would instantly think of them and of what she could do for them that day. Then, with the feeling one has after waking from a pleasant dream to realize it was just a dream, her spirit would chill. “I awoke this morning after Bill left,” she wrote four months after her mother’s death, “and lying there I realized Bill was gone, but the comfortable feeling came over me, Mother and Daddy are home. Then I remembered. It comes at unexpected moments, the time to fix a bite for supper, meals they had up here, the back of someone’s head that looks like Daddy’s, Mother’s old wheelchair in the coat closet, Daddy’s battered hat on my bookshelf.”

  To this day, reminders are still thoughtfully scattered throughout Ruth’s house. Mrs. Bell’s black cane leans against the hearth in Ruth’s bedroom, and nearby is her mother’s ruffled pillow. Dr. Bell’s favorite suit hangs in the hall closet, and his hat is propped on a corner of his framed portrait in Ruth’s bedroom. A bowl brought back from China is on the mantel. She would claim in later life that as the years went by, she missed her parents more, not less.

  “It’s odd,” she said in 1996, “but I think of them more now than I used to. For some reason, I think they’re down at the house. It seems they are, and I start to call.”

  In private, Ruth was poignantly sentimental, translating people into symbols when they were absent. The packet of love letters Billy wrote her in their youth is worn and fragile after countless perusals while he was away. In the early years, she slept with his tweed jacket when she was home alone. Stuffed animals, toys, and clothes in the children’s empty bedrooms somehow never got packed. One can walk in upstairs rooms now and find remnants of early lives past.

  In 1975, when Ruth was in Taiwan for a crusade, she bought slabs of marble for headstones, because she wanted her parents’ grave markers to come from China. S
he was fifty-five now, her children scattered and pursuing their own lives. Her parents were no longer waiting for her visits and phone calls. Billy was busier than ever. Ruth rose in a whirlwind of motion. For starters, she got arrested.

  It was a sunny afternoon, May 20, 1975. Spring was sweet as the sun twinkled on the small lake in Charlotte’s Freedom Park. Ducks waddled on the shore and paddled through murky water, and yellow flowers bordered benches and dotted the shore. Pooled around the bandshell was a sea of colorful suits, shirts, dresses, some seventy-five thousand people there to celebrate Mecklenburg Independence Day. President Gerald Ford was to deliver a short speech. Senator Jesse Helms was present, as was Billy Graham. Peppering the crowd were the inevitable protesters and their signs:

  “GRAHAM AND FORD.”

  “GOD AND COUNTRY MY ASS!”

  “FORD HAS A BETTER IDEA.”

  “FORD’S A TORY.”

  On the rise behind the shell, the demonstrators booed. They made loud asides and blew a bugle when anyone got up to speak. Ruth sat in the front row, next to the center aisle, in a restricted area that had been roped off for security. Midway through Ford’s speech she noticed heads turning. Beside her in the aisle she spotted a scraggly young man, barefoot, shirtless, short, and wiry. He had slipped under the ropes moments earlier, a cardboard sign tucked by his side. Now, almost to the front he turned to face the crowd, holding his placard high overhead, “EAT THE RICH,” it read on one side, “DON’T TREAD ON ME,” it said on the other. He did not notice the handsome woman just behind him.

  It was a reflex when Ruth snatched the sign from his hands. She sat back down, firmly planting her white pumps on top of it as the protester whipped around like a man whose pocket has just been picked. Ruth seemed oblivious to what she had just done, and was calmly listening to the president when the young dissenter spotted his property. He squatted beside her, and asked her to return his sign. She patted his shoulder in a motherly way, shook her head, and smiled. Police officers briskly escorted him to the other side of the ropes.