Love, loss, and what they wore

It was probably the only wake in the world where it was perfectly acceptable — even expected — for people to wear yellow: bright yellow, muted yellow, sunflower yellow. If they didn’t have the shirt, they wore black with yellow ribbons pinned on their chest. Even their cars sported yellow ribbons.

The color of protest in the ‘80s, yellow has come back to be the color of grief and thanksgiving at Tita Cory’s death. Yellow has put the fire back in our hearts, but our fists are not raised in anger as they were from 1983 to 1986; this time we made the sign of the cross and said our little thanks. 

In grief, she wore black; in her fight, she wore yellow — and we all wore yellow with her and waved our little yellow flags; sometimes our yellow was diluted with green for her vice presidential candidate Doy Laurel’s UNIDO color.

But mostly, we wore yellow.

Ninoy’s mother, Doña Aurora Aquino — Apung Guindang to everybody in Concepcion, Tarlac — wore black for three years, two years more than the traditional year of grieving. She said she would be in mourning until Marcos was in power. So the whole town of Concepcion, which had lost its mayor and its brightest son to the national stage in the late ‘60s, then to prison and eventually exile and death, mourned with her. 

Children today ask: Why are you wearing yellow to a funeral? Why are you flashing the “Loser” sign? And parents explain to them: Ninoy was in jail for seven years, in exile for three years, and he was coming home but he wasn’t sure people still cared, so he alluded to that song of a prisoner that said, “Tie a yellow ribbon ‘round the old oak tree if you still want me.”

He never made it outside the airport and he never saw the yellow ribbons tied along the roads of Manila — much less the ones in his hometown.

Then Cory came home. She wore black. She walked around the casket of Ninoy at the Manila Memorial Park and blessed it with holy water — not a tear in her eyes, not a sob on her lips.

So we did the public demonstration of emotions for her: We alternately raised clenched fists or flashed the Laban sign, and the buildings on Ayala Avenue cried yellow for her. And still, Apung Guindang wore black — until Cory took her oath as president.

No matter how you feel about People Power or about Cory — maybe you say no blood spilled during Edsa, therefore it couldn’t have been a revolution — it was a revolution. You’d have to be extra-stupid not to recognize that it was, like the people who still claim that the Holocaust never happened.

You’d have to be so ignorant of your own history to not know that before Ninoy was assassinated, before Cory became president, people were being thrown in jail (without warrants!) for expressing their opinions and many of them were never seen again.

You’d have to be so grateful for democracy, for having the freedom today to say that GMA should choke on her own vomit — and still live to see the morning. 

Of course, some people just remember the Marcos years differently.

What would the Philippines be if we — or more precisely the generation before us who were college students and parents themselves during the
First Quarter Storm and in the decade that followed — did not fight for our democracy?

Would we be like the Iranians today wearing green ribbons to protest the elections and our only recourse to free speech is Twitter, YouTube or Facebook? You wonder what the 7 o’clock news is like in Iran.

Would our spiritual leaders, like the monks of Burma stepping out of their temples in their cinnamon-color robes, be marching in the streets silently? Or would our young be like the Brazilians in the ‘90s, defiantly wearing black instead of the national colors green and yellow? Or would we have Poland’s White Marches, originating from protests against communism when they used white banners?

I attended my first rally when I was 13 years old. Rather, it was a funeral, when Ninoy’s casket was briefly brought home to Concepcion. The succeeding rallies were kept small in the town of Ninoy’s birthplace precisely because it was controlled by Marcos’s red-and-blue KBL party.

My lasting memory of Aug. 21, 1983 is of my grandfather leaving early in the morning with his friends and their yellow ribbons as part of a welcoming group for Ninoy. They were friends of Apung Guindang, they saw her in church every day. And like Cory, she was the spiritual leader of many people and her house was always open to them.

The Aquinos’ house in Concepcion is but four or five blocks from my grandparents’ house — so near the church you’d think people went to hear Mass only because they woke from the loud clanging of the bells at 5 a.m. anyway.

The Aquinos’ house has a low concrete fence — so low you could see the fishpond in the middle of the sprawling property with a stone statue of a woman seated on it. When we were kids we used to run past the house because rumor had it that when it got dark the stone statue would get up and walk around.

In 1986, my aunt Rose Alday was an idealistic student at the UP College of Law. She volunteered to be an election watcher and carted off all her law books to a precinct in a barrio in Concepcion on election day, thinking she could cite the election code if something illegal was happening. By evening, the goons of Mayor Nicolas Feliciano were confiscating the ballot boxes despite the presence of journalists and foreign observers, including a Carmelite priest named Fr. Francis Considine, whom they began kicking in front of her.

You don’t know the meaning of “guns, goons and gold” if you didn’t experience an election in the province during the Marcos years.

Before she could even open her law books, my aunt had armalites pointed at her. In Apung Guindang’s house, Time magazine reporter Sandra Burton interviewed her and several other Namfrel volunteers — while a photographer from Malaya named Benjie Guevara was detained by the police and who later hid in our house.

Cory’s death has brought back all these memories for so many people — she symbolized a time when people actually cared about what was happening to the country.

Rose waited in the rain for six and a half hours with her two daughters to see Cory on the last night of the wake — and yet her girls were not even born during Edsa or Cory’s term. She wanted them to know, she said, what’s it like to be part of something great that they wouldn’t be so soft or apathetic about the things happening.

It seems like the years have gone so quickly for everybody.

Today there is the Ninoy Museum in Tarlac, but I remember the summer of 1989 or 1990 when I brought my sorority sisters from UP to spend the weekend in my grandparents’ home in Concepcion. One afternoon, we visited the Aquino house and asked the caretaker if we could go in to take a look. There in a small, cordoned-off room on the ground floor was a recreation of his jail cell.

I wonder about the Aquino house in Concepcion now — what has and will happen to it? Do the new residents of the town know whose house it was, would they even care? I hope that they do — even if the house, for one reason or another through the years, just looked so grand and yet so sad.