From the LA Times:
Ruth Graham, the wife of evangelist Billy Graham, who supported her famous husband as he spread the Gospel to millions but dispelled the notion of the demure preacher’s wife with her humor, spunk, poetry-writing and motorcycle riding, died Thursday at her home in Montreat, N.C., from complications of pneumonia. She was 87.
“Ruth was my life partner, and we were called by God as a team,” Billy Graham said in a statement released Thursday.
“No one else could have borne the load that she carried. 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.”
It was Ruth Graham who dissuaded her husband from launching a campaign for the U.S. presidency: She told him she would leave him if he quit his ministry. The American public would not accept a divorced man as president, she warned….
Long before Billy Graham’s legendary 1957 crusade in New York — the beginning of a journey that would take him to 185 countries and territories — she understood that his calling would eclipse her own. The woman who once had dreams of becoming a missionary in Tibet surrendered them for her husband.
“If I marry Bill, I marry him with my eyes open,” she wrote in her journal. “He will be increasingly burdened for lost souls and increasingly active in the Lord’s work …. I will slip into the background…. In short, be a lost life. Lost in Bill’s.”
The couple married Aug. 13, 1943, and had five children. In addition to her husband, Graham’s survivors include her children: Virginia, Anne, Ruth Bell, Franklin (William Franklin III), and Nelson Edman.