Legacy MattersFrom Richard Fernandez
The city ground to a halt. Ships sounded their mournful horns at harbor. Bells rang and millions stood in the rain along the 14 mile route to the cemetery. Former Philippine Ambassador to the Vatican Howard Dee said:
“I was in Magsaysay’s and Ninoy’s funeral. This is the greatest outpouring of love the nation has ever witnessed.” Dee, … was referring to the funerals of President Ramon Magsaysay in 1957 and of Aquino’s murdered husband, opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr., in 1983.
Like those events, this funeral was also political. The Aquino family had pointedly refused a state funeral and mourned her instead as an honored daughter of the Church, laying her in the coffin with a rosary in her hand. It was a pointed slap at the current President, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who had been accused of trying to extend her term of office past its constitutional limit, a la the Honduran Zelaya. Her carefully staged trip to Washington had been wholly eclipsed by Aquino’s death, from which she returned in haste. She was clearly unwelcome and made a brief, almost furtive appearance at the wake. Her reception was correct. No one would have called it warm. Even in death Cory would bar authoritarianism.
That procession in the rain was Cory’s last duty of state; the final act in the public drama. It was also, to those who understood it, the concluding chapter in a love story. At the end of the cortege was a relatively modest grave, no grander than that which a successful small businessman might have, dug beside the spot where Ninoy lay. It was where she wanted to go. When she first learned she had colon cancer more than a year ago, Aquino told her family she would refuse aggressive treatment. Her time, she said, had come. Her daughter Kris related how, when end was near, she was called back into the room by a nurse from the corridor, where she had stepped out to drink some coffee. Cory bade her daughter bend and said, “I can see him now. Your father is holding out his hand to me.” Dylan Thomas wrote of grave men “near death, who see with blinding sight”; of those on their deathbeds who, perhaps from the effects medication, their last delirium or that blinding sight see before them those to whom they would come. Underneath the story of the People Power revolution was also a story of a woman who avenged her husband and reached out to him at the last across the gulf of death with the frail hand of love.