Thank you, Tita Cory

How much a part of us you were. And fervently shall we always love, remember, and thank you, although never quite enough.

Everyone will hail you as an icon of democracy. I must express an elliptical view. You have been that, yes, but more importantly, you will be a continuing example, symbol and representation of decency and courage.

Democracy is just another form of government, after all. It does not necessarily equate or lead to good governance and better lives all around. A dictatorship or an autocracy may be more fitting and effective for certain states.

Much pronounced is this apparent irony in our own nation in our own times, where democracy fails to translate into a more salubrious environment for the greater number. Rather does it serve as a false if reputedly clean bill of health cloaking nefarious activities that oppress a people more than the muzzles of guns. 

You led us back to freedom and democracy, yes, for which we should be ever grateful. We regained the space from a travesty and a burlesque of selfless, effective rule. We reveled in the restoration of liberty from ostentation, profligacy, and nutty talk about holes in the sky. 

Thank you too for putting an end, if briefly, to clannish fealty or loyalty to tribe, as manifested by a quintessential Ilocano’s — make that Pinoy’s — grand scheme of patronage. And thank you for showing the world that we weren’t all cowards under the boot of one bastard.

Thank you for those heady days of hope and resolve born of outrage, of yellow ribbons and Cory! Cory! chants and long marches, of Bayan Ko and the APO, of a standing ovation at the US Congress, a Time magazine cover, and having us stand tall all over the world.

But thank you, above all, for the sense of fresh, clean, sweet-smelling sheets as the poet Cesar Ruiz Aquino imagined beyond metaphor, for the aura of good housekeeping that embraced us, before the usual whispers in lobbies and anterooms began to soil the daily laundry.

Thank you for the decent, honest men such as Rene Saguisag, Adolf Azcuna, Catalino Macaraig, Alran Bengzon, Ping de Jesus, Frank Drilon, Butch Abad, Bobby Tañada, Elfren Cruz, Raffy Alunan and many more like them who served with you. Thank you for the decent, hard-working women such as Alice Reyes, Margie Juico, Ching Escaler, Imelda Nicolas and many more like them who followed your lead and selflessly gave of themselves for country, urged on by the simple notion of decency.   

Thank you for your family, and for reshaping the good old centrist mindset — middle-class and then some, leftist and rightist and rich and poor, and indigenes and even outright tourists in their, our own country.

Thank you for not hiding under any bed when miscreants in and out of the military attempted to push their own agenda of supposed ideals that really only served one man, who now heads the senate because we are all as forgiving as you were.   

While I cannot join the legions who take after you as a saint of prayer, as a believer in worship and supplication, I must acknowledge that every hour a Filipino spends in church may mean an hour less of a chance to dip fingers into another’s cookie jar or a country’s coffers.

I pray only that everyone’s eyes open wider and deeper at every instance of hypocrisy. 

Decency, nobility, humility, valor — those traits are what compose your strength of spirit and character. Would that we all follow your lead in those non-denominational areas of human conduct.

For a quarter of a century we have been strengthened and honored by your presence. In your passing I believe we will exercise more circumspection, the way it spelled your second nature.

Oh, capsule bios and thumbnail sketches in foreign publications will inevitably mention that you were “inept” or “indecisive,” and seemed to have natural disasters as your presidential term’s birthright. The “Mendiola Massacre,” the energy crisis, and the failure of agrarian reform will mark the apparent blights for a style of governance founded basically on sincerity. And the self-proclaimed nationalists will scoff with contempt at your march in the rain to appeal to a senate for the retention of the US bases.

That you could allow your own former Cabinet men and allies to look sheepishly up at the sky and say “Ask me another, Ma’am,” and still retain respect and love for them, says more about your sterling quality of character.  

A fairer reckoning of your place in our snail-paced procession towards full emancipation would be that that once upon a time, there lived a quiet lady who was thrust upon a crossroads of turbulence in the very pages of history, and did not flinch as she fulfilled what she saw as her destined role.  

You knew your limits, and you knew better than to overstay your welcome. For this, too, we thank you.

Unfortunately, many of the paeans that will now be showered on you will be by way of comparison to someone who may not share your appreciation of closure. The word “odious” must have been invented for this comparison, however inevitable.  

It is very sad as well that you did not live on to see the day when your dreams for our country would take shape.

A close friend of your family sent the following SMS on this first day of August: “Am sad and angry. Sad as we lost our single symbol of uncompromising leadership. Anger as she was not able to see the Filipino people really free. Let her death remind us to continue her quest for what she wanted to see. Now we have to do it ourselves. She has done her part. Time to do our part individually.”

Yes. Let us put an end to political patronage, to this cavalier treatment of us all as weak and pliant children of a democratic system gone haywire, one turned into travesty and burlesque once again. 

Tita Cory gave us our hour of “splendor in the grass, glory in the flower.” That hour will expand its ambit of splendor and glory when our history turns the corner, for the better and the best.

Suffice to say for now that our innate sense of signification, yes, even superstition, should serve us in good stead. That this noble lady born on Robert Burns Day fought on to make it to August of 2009, and join her husband Ninoy in marking this month as a fated hallmark in the cycle of revolution, is one such oddment of signification. 

On a personal note, thank you, Tita Cory, for all the yellow T-shirts with your image and Ninoy’s name that I keep among my vintage wardrobe collection. Thank you for lending your name and inspiration to my daughter. Thank you for speaking nicely and graciously to her when she was but a child looking up at you. And thank you for that telephone call when you thanked me for something I had written, and we wound up chatting about our Sunday-painter aspirations. Thank you for suggesting acrylic in lieu of oil for easier amateurish application.   

Today it pours, and again our people will say even the skies are weeping. This is why I love our country of simple, childlike people of good cheer and mighty song, of basic decency like you. And if it must be under a torrent that we walk up to Greenhills to be among the first in the expected horde at your public wake, so should it be our great privilege.

Thank you for this, too, Tita Cory.