For a quarter of a century, she commanded our nation’s attention: demonstrating the power of sincerity, the force of simplicity.
She was the prism through which we projected our grandest hopes. She was the pin on our moral compass as a people.
So many superlatives have been said of Corazon Cojuangco Aquino since her passing. She deserved them all.
To the end, she remained her people’s president: firm in her beliefs, clear in the values she holds and unshakable in the face of adversity. She loved her people and was deeply loved in return.
She was a reluctant leader. But when she accepted the challenge to serve, she poured all of herself into what had to be done.
Her soft voice and motherly demeanor misled her enemies. They did not expect her to be such a woman of steely determination.
An intensely private person, she would have preferred a quiet life away from the tumult of politics. But marriage and history conspired to drag her out of the kitchen to the pinnacle of leadership, to the merciless glare of the world’s eye. She bore both tragedy and victory with such composure that even those who disagreed with her respected her nevertheless.
And how could one not respect Cory Aquino? She was the epitome of grace under pressure. In the most difficult decisions she had to make, she made sure she was just. In the most trying of times, she was constant. In moments of great despair, she had an incredible capacity to find basis for hope.
A woman of profound faith, she was never lost in the mad cross-currents of emotions and ideologies. A woman of immense kindness, she could not be dragged down by the politics of hate that characterized her time.
To say that Cory influenced the life of a nation is to render her time in the public sphere in the abstract. She influenced lives, changed persons, and touched many.
Cory was many things to many people. So many of us have stories to tell; so many translations of the same person defined by all our individual experiences.
I was among the first who dared turn up at their Times Street home shortly after Ninoy was shot. Cory I first saw at the Sto. Domingo church: mourning beside her husband’s bloodied corpse.
The birth of our first son, Kalayaan, prevented Susan and I from joining the historic funeral march for Ninoy. But in the succeeding months of hectic protests, we joined the marches with our newborn in our arms.
On the eve of the Edsa Revolution, we picketed the government television station, protesting the lies they peddled there. When our voices turned hoarse, we would put Kalayaan, then all of two-and-a-half years, to the megaphone. His little voice, repeating our chants, kept our verbal barrage going. He was surely the youngest agitator of that historic moment.
When the Kongreso ng Mamamayang Pilipino (Kompil) was convened early in 1984, I was tasked to deliver the briefing on the political situation. The briefing on the economic situation was delivered by an economics professor named Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Kompil was organized to coordinate all anti-Marcos groups. It turned out to be a short-lived coalition.
People very close to Cory approached me as I walked up the stage, pleading that I desist from pushing our group’s position on the boycott-participation debate. Gloria Arroyo, who spoke ahead of me, leaned towards participation in the 1984 Batasan elections. But the groups I represented were advocating a boycott campaign and my task that day was to argue our option.
Kompil broke the day it was launched on the boycott vs. participation debate. But for the 1986 elections, the groups I represented at the Kompil supported Cory’s candidacy and campaigned hard for votes. We guarded the ballots with our bodies and, when the elections were stolen, were first on the barricades.
I remember the day in May 1986 when our second son, Sandino, was born. I was serving the new revolutionary government as caretaker of the President’s Center for Special Studies (PCSS), a Marcos think-tank we took over. Returning to the PCSS office from a meeting in the Palace, I was met by excited employees delivering the news that my wife had gone into labor.
I suppose the graduate students who composed the take-over team had been a little heavy handed. Adrian Cristobal, the deposed head of the PCSS, had very publicly complained about “Magno’s brown shirts” — with reference to Hitler’s youth arm. President Cory decided she had no use for the PCSS and ordered its dissolution, rendering a talented staff of writers and analysts unemployed. Later on Adrian and I would be good friends — or at least the bohemian equivalent of that.
Over the past few years, I would get the chance to meet Cory Aquino only rarely, often in the course of my duties as a member of the Edsa People Power Commission. The last time I managed to shake her hand was two years ago, when I welcomed her to the Edsa Shrine for the mass commemorating the revolution. Since she called on President Arroyo to resign in 2005, the Edsa anniversary always involved a delicate maneuver to keep the two powerful women apart.
The vagaries of political currents before and after the Edsa Revolution sometimes put friends at odds with each other, allies became critics and vice versa. But however the political lines were drawn and redrawn at each turn of the unfolding story of our time, all of us looked to Cory as our own.
She personified a great aspiration we all held to dearly and was, therefore, an icon for all of us to partake of.