It was terminal. She was 76 last Saturday when I woke up to the news of her death. It was raining. How fitting, I thought. I was still in Manila and the last time I witnessed a similar outpour of widespread sadness back home was in March 1995, when Singapore executed a kababayan domestic worker, Flor Contemplacion. But back then, there was anger in our grief. We burned effigies. We cursed. We raged. In contrast, when Cory passed on, although we were mourning we were also grateful that she was with us. We lighted candles. We prayed. We wept.
The Philippine armed forces — some of whose finest officers and men rebelled against her nine times during her six-year term — paid profuse tribute to their former commander-in-chief. Her political opponents, which included the current president and the children of Ferdinand Marcos, had to be seen at her wake. All over the P.I., the people wore yellow ribbons or T-shirts in her honor. Along major thoroughfares, Cory banners could be seen while newspapers published full-page, colored obituaries lauding this woman whose predecessor once dismissed as an ignorant, plain housewife.
Her husband, Sen. Ninoy Aquino, was a brash and brilliant politician who everyone thought would succeed Marcos as president. Instead, he was jailed shortly after martial law was declared in 1972 and was only released eight years later after he agreed to leave the country. Ninoy was in jail when Tony Orlando & Dawn’s “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” became a massive hit song in 1973. A decade later, Ninoy announced that he was ending his exile in Boston and was going home despite the “serious death threats” relayed to her by Mrs. Marcos herself.
“Oh, tie a yellow ribbon ‘round the ole oak tree. It’s been three long years. Do you still want me?” Ninoy, ala Tony Orlando, asked the Filipino people. On the day of his arrival, Aug. 21, 1983, I’m still not sure if there were oak trees in Manila at the time, but yellow ribbons and banners were everywhere. But Ninoy, we would learn later that day, was already dead, shot upon arrival at the airport. It was his widow, Cory, who made yellow the color of protest and courage.
In late 1985, when the opposition was in danger of fragmenting just before the presidential election scheduled by the aging, ailing autocrat, Cory agreed to run as the unity candidate. She sought office not because she wanted to, but because she had to. “Walang alam” — know-nothing — was how her formidable opponent, in power since 1965, described her. Cory shot back: “I agree. I know nothing. I know nothing about lying. I know nothing about repression. I know nothing about thievery. I know nothing about corruption.”
On Election Day, Feb. 7, 1986, for the first and perhaps last time in our chaotic republic’s history, voters gathered at the polling centers to choose between good and evil. No one doubted the outcome of the election, but the regime refused to go gently into the good night and had to be ousted by the people themselves.
As president, Cory restored our freedoms, defeated one coup attempt after another, declined another term in office, and campaigned hard to ensure that her chosen successor, Fidel V. Ramos, would become president. She who spurned power used it wisely.
Whenever there was yet another political crisis, she would emerge from retirement to offer moral guidance, and the people, already disgusted with politics, would listen.
In a country where there is so much to hate and about which there is too much to despair, she taught us to love and to hope.
“Hope not being hope,” the poet Marianne Moore once said, “until all ground for hope has vanished.”
As she was buried beside her husband on Wednesday, we thanked her for how she had lived — her decency, dignity, nobility. We still know an exemplary person when we see one. Perhaps there’s hope for us.
President Cory’s husband famously said that the Filipino is worth dying for. A rhetorical flourish from a politico, I thought even back then in my idealistic days. But when his wife left us I realized he must be referring to her.
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