‘History & Her Story’ (Remembering Cory Aquino on her 5th death anniversary)

Cory Aquino was wearing fuchsia, not yellow, the last time I interviewed her. It was the eve of the 23rd anniversary of the 1986 EDSA people power revolution, about five months before she passed away.

Cory had just undergone six hours of chemotherapy, and was wearing a portable chemo drip bag over one shoulder. But the Cory Aquino who met with me was in high spirits, energetic and at times, nostalgic. Despite her chemo treatments, she walked briskly around the seventh floor of the family-owned Cojuangco building in Makati, where she held office, and where her desk, and some of her papers, are still as she had left them.

She had lost weight, and her hair was thinning. But otherwise, life seemed very normal. When STAR photographer Joven Cagande arrived to take her photo, Cory asked me, “Can I put lipstick on first?”

“At a certain point, I think, Lord, I don’t want to complain, but there are times...” her voice trailed off. Then she continued, “I have my good days of course, but I also do have my bad days. This last time had an episode of nosebleed, and the last time I had a nosebleed was when I was a teenager!”

What kept her going through the bad days was not just her legendary courage — it was her total surrender of her illness to God.

“Jesus Christ never committed any sin and had to suffer all the way until he died,” she pointed out to me.

 “In the beginning, when my doctors first told me the news, they all looked so glum. I was prepared to go. I’ve lived a full life. I have been President,” she added.

At the time of the interview, it had been a year since the discovery of her cancer. But the woman who had to endure seven years of her husband’s incarceration, his assassination and subsequent attempts on her own life (in the 1989 coup attempt, rebel soldiers had gotten close enough to her house on Arlegui street) did not hide her physical pain.

“It’s there. I leave it up to God. It’s up to Him. But I’m not dying to live long. I never even expected to live this long. I am 76 years old and I was widowed at 50.”

Even when in suffering, she was thinking of her countrymen. “I wonder, what else is there for me to do, especially with helping the poor through microfinance? Ano pa ba ang kulang? What else should I do?”

* * *

A few months after that, Cory was hospitalized because she had lost her appetite. She was never able to return home to Times Street again, though her final wish, according to her daughter Ballsy Cruz, was “to go home.”

“She was telling Noynoy (then Sen. Benigno Aquino III), ‘I want to go home. I just want to go home’,” Ballsy recounted to me once. Asked whether “home” meant the family home on Times St., or Ballsy’s home, where Cory lived in the months prior to her confinement in June 2009 at the Makati Medical Center, Ballsy said they weren’t always sure. One of Cory’s spiritual advisers, Bishop Socrates Villegas, now Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop, told them that “home” to the deeply spiritual Cory could have meant, “home to the Father.”

Going home wasn’t a fleeting wish for Cory, even if she was told she had to bring home with her some medical equipment to make her more comfortable. But Cory had difficulty breathing, so she had to stay longer in the hospital. The family thought Cory had given up on going home, till one day she said again, “I really want to go home already.”

“And then the following morning she kept waking up and asking if her driver Norie had already arrived,” Ballsy confided to me, “I said, ‘Mom it’s only 3 a.m. Norie will come later, he’s still asleep’.”

But Cory kept on telling her eldest daughter, “‘But don’t forget ha, don’t forget.’ She was just so excited. She also asked me to remind Norie to bring the van, for all her things.”

Ballsy said yes to all her mother’s requests, but Cory felt dizzy on the very day she was supposed to check out of the hospital. It was then, believed Ballsy, that her mother stopped asking to be discharged from the hospital. In her delicate condition, she didn’t want to be a burden to her children at home, even if she had a private nurse.

“She was always thinking of us,” Ballsy said.

When they were told that the end was near for Cory and that she may be just valiantly holding on for the sake of her children, the youngest Aquino sibling Kris volunteered to assure her mother that the family would be okay even after she was gone.

“That night, I think Kris was trying to say, ‘Mom we’re really all okay, we’ll help one another. All of us will help one another. Even if you’re no longer here, we will make things easier for each other.’ And then it was as if Mom was calling Dad, ‘O, Ninoy!’”

Cory Aquino died about a week after that, assured that her loved ones on earth were going to be alright, assured that her loved one in heaven was waiting for her and certain that it was her time “to go home to the Father.”

After Cory died on Aug. 1, 2009 after 18 months of battling cancer, her children went through her things, hoping they would find letters with her personal instructions to them. Filipinos call this bilin. Their father Ninoy, before his death, had written them all letters. But they found no such letters from Cory.

Perhaps because Cory Aquino’s life was already one eloquent bilin to those she loved. It was only the final bilin  — that she wanted to go home — that she had to make, and it was fulfilled.

(To be concluded)

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