Burial woes in the Graham family.

Ruth Bell Graham, wife of minister Billy Graham, is seeming to be pretty close to meeting her Maker. She wants to be buried in the North Carolina mountains, near where she raised their kids, by a small chapel near The Cove in Asheville. Naturally, she would like her husband to be buried next to her. One of their sons, Franklin, would rather bury them in Charlotte, at a memorial “library” being built by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA), which Franklin heads. Their youngest son, Ned, disagrees and wants to respect his mother’s wishes.

Also in agreement with Ned is family friend, crime novelist Patricia Cornwell…

Cornwell toured the building site and saw the proposed burial plot. She was asked by Ned, who opposes Franklin’s choice, to come and give his father her impression.

“I was horrified by what I saw,” she tells Billy, in the presence of a reporter invited to be there.

The building, designed in part by consultants who used to work for Walt Disney Co., is not a library, she says, but a large 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 past 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 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 as she talks.

“It’s a circus,” Ruth says at one point, softly. “A tourist attraction.”

Ruth’s wishes?

“My Final Wishes Concerning My Burial Site” says, in part: “Since it is impossible for me to be buried at my ‘first home’ in China, my next choice is the beautiful mountains of Western North Carolina which I have loved and where I have lived for the past 60 years.”

A number of years ago, the document continues, she and Billy “agreed that we would be buried together near the chapel at The Cove. The Memorial Garden at Chatlos Chapel was prepared for that very purpose. My final wish is to be buried at The Cove. Under no circumstances am I to be buried in Charlotte, North Carolina.”

I think the answer is a simple one: respect her wishes and let her be buried where she wants to be buried.