Graham has a Solomon-like decision to make

MONTREAT — It is a struggle worthy of the Old Testament, pitting brother against brother, son against mother, and leaving famous evangelist father, the Rev. Billy Graham, trapped in the middle, pondering what to do. Retired and almost blind at 88, Billy Graham is sitting in his modest log house 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 Graham's wife, Ruth Bell Graham, 86, is listening too, curled up in a hospital bed on a bleak November evening. On her left sits her younger son, Ned, 48, who has taken care of her and her husband for almost four years, and Ned's wife, Christina.
Events will unfold quickly in the days after: more meetings at the house, prayers, and a notarized document produced that Ruth signed before six witnesses. But at this moment, everyone's attention is on the friend, crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, who is talking about a memorial "library" that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, or BGEA, headed by Franklin Graham, is building in Charlotte. Cornwell toured the building site and saw the proposed burial plot. She was asked by Ned Graham, who opposes Franklin Graham's choice, to come and give his father her impression.
"I was horrified by what I saw," she told Billy Graham, in the presence of a reporter invited to be there.
The building, designed in part by consultants who used to work for the Walt Disney Co., is not a library, she said, but a big barn and silo - a reminder of Billy Graham's early 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 fund-raising," Cornwell told 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."
Ruth Graham has told her children that she doesn't want to be buried in Charlotte. She has a burial spot picked out in the mountains where she raised five children, and she hopes that her husband will join her there. Ned Graham has been working to convince his three sisters, Gigi, Bunny and Anne, that their mother's wishes should be followed.
But six years ago, Franklin Graham, 54, took over BGEA and is trying to convince their dad of the appropriateness of the Charlotte burial site, Ned Graham and another family member say. Franklin Graham, in a telephone interview, said that no decision has been made. "Some of the board members feel the library ought to be the place," he said.
The issue threatens to tear asunder what some have called the royal family of American religion, and Billy Graham is being asked to make a Solomon-like choice between the wishes of his heir and his wife of 63 years.

— Laura Sessions Stepp for the Washington Post

A mechanical talking cow at a park designed by Disney consultants hardly seems to be an appropriate prelude to viewing the grave of this humble, earnest, and beloved Christian evangelist.