Clichés can be dangerous because, no matter how true they may be, they don’t always fit and it becomes too easy to use one.

In the case of Ruth Bell Graham, however, the cliché of ‘the good woman’ behind the great man is beyond true. It’s no overstatement to say that without Ruth Bell Graham the success of Billy Graham and his worldwide fame would have been far less.

She, like her husband, devoted her life to God, but while he hoped to be an evangelist, she wanted to be a missionary. Born and raised in China, she hoped to return to Tibet as a missionary after college in the United States.

But she met Billy Graham at Wheaton College in Illinois and things changed. She always said that after hearing him praying in the chapel that he sounded like a man who knew to whom he was speaking. It was a marriage that helped make religious history.

She was his closest confidant and advisor and she was also, much of the time, a single parent as Billy Graham traveled the world. The flip side of Graham’s fame and success was his absence from home. She had the major responsibility for raising five children, giving them discipline and spiritual training and all five of her children give her all the credit in the world. It could not have been easy, but she and her husband understood that his calling served a greater cause even though his absence created a major void at home. It was a price paid for something they both devoted their lives to.

She wrote over a dozen books about Christian living and spirituality, was honored many times for her own charitable works and was given the Congressional gold medal alongside her husband in 1996, a recognition that she was far more than just the wife of a famed evangelist.

Bedridden and nearly blind for several months and wheelchair-bound for years before that, she never lost her sense of humor or her zest for life.

Her daughter, Anne, says that while her mother was sweet and gentle, she also had a playful, feisty streak. Anne tells the story of coming home from school one day to find a local teenager riding his motorcycle up and down the road with a woman dressed in blue jeans on the back of his bike. It was her mother. Anne has always said that her mother’s zest for life defined her as much as her deep faith.

She will be buried on the grounds of the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte. That is not what she wished a few months ago when she stated emphatically she wanted to be buried on the grounds of the Billy Graham training center in Asheville. But the site, among the most beautiful places you will find, is not easy to get to. Franklin Graham convinced his parents that many thousands would want to pay their respects to Billy and Ruth and it would be difficult to accommodate such crowds in that setting.

So, those thousands will come to the Billy Graham library setting and when the 88-year-old Graham joins his wife, those thousands will pay their respects, not only to Graham, but to the woman who shared his life for 64 years. It seems more than fitting because the cliché most certainly rings true.