Cory Aquino: a celebration of her life & love!
Today a wife is brought to her final resting place beside her man in Manila Memorial Park. In a corner so ordinary as everything around them, the only indication they’re even there is if one doesn’t happen to miss two plain epitaphs bearing the couple’s nicknames: “CORY” and “NINOY.”
Ninoy didn’t have the privilege to see his housewife become the first woman president in all of Asia. Their 29 years of marriage has been punctuated by his seven and a half years of incarceration, and cut short by his brutal assassination. His death served as the candle that shed light until his countrymen joined his cause which turned darkness into yellow. Her passing, a reminder never to give in to that gloom that tries to envelope us as a nation.
My wife & I belong to a generation who only knew Cory as a widow, but never a wife. Our blog entries the past couple of days served as our own first time glimpse into her married life. Indeed, Ninoy and his housewife was an ordinary couple who led extra ordinary lives because of their love for the country. May our generation never forget that ‘the good & the beautiful’ is a stark contrast from the simple and ordinary.
This is our final tribute to Ninoy’s bride. Here we celebrate her life & love!
“I’ve been thinking, ‘Would I ever have married anybody else?’ I don’t think so. And not that nobody ever looked at me. Because I am vain enough to think that there were others. But none of them ever measured to my husband’s qualities. And I feel blessed that we found each other…”
– Cory on being married to Ninoy
“He could solve almost any problem. And I also felt whatever problem I had, I could just bring to him, and he would find ways and means of addressing that problem, or the two of us could easily look for solutions. But this time, both of us were powerless to do so. And so the two of us naturally had to turn to God. And while I was prayerful before, I was not as fervently prayerful as I became. Because before, what were my problems? Really nothing. And very inconsequential compared to the enormous problems that were brought to us because of Martial Law.”
– Cory, on being married to Ninoy during his incarceration
(The above clips are part of Cory’s video interview by Dr. Shann Ferch in November 2004. Visit coryaquino.ph to view the complete video interview and the full transcript.)