Ninoy Aquino and the woman he loved

(I wrote this piece on Ninoy Aquino’s 20th death anniversary nine years ago.)

It was a little past midnight of Aug. 20, 1983 in Boston, Massachusetts, and Ballsy Aquino couldn’t sleep. Her father Ninoy was due to arrive in Manila any moment now, and he promised her that he would give her a call as soon as he had a moment to himself after he disembarked.

Ballsy, the eldest of Ninoy and Cory Aquino’s five children, was the type who would ask for a call from any member of the family who was away from home. Thus, Ninoy made sure he rang up Ate (his pet name for Ballsy, since she was “ate” to her four siblings Pinky, Noynoy, Viel and Kris) “every step of the way”  during a stopover in Los Angeles and on his last night in Taipei.

During his last call to Ballsy, who had just celebrated her birthday two days before on Aug. 18, Ninoy said, “Ate, I left my ATM card in Boston. It’s yours now, it’s my birthday gift to you.” He was at the Grand Hotel in Taipei, and was due to leave for Manila the following morning, Aug. 21.

But in the early morning hours of Aug. 21, 1983, Boston time, the much-awaited call was long in coming. Ballsy left the room she shared with a sister and went to her parents’ room. She lay down on her father’s side of the bed  the side near the telephone  and waited. She found that her mother Cory was still awake, too. And waiting.

The phone rang. But it wasn’t Dad.

* * *

Instead, someone from the Kyodo news agency in New York was asking confirmation about her father’s assassination.

“Where did you get this story?” Ballsy replied. It was 2:30 a.m. In a way, by making Ballsy sleep in her Dad’s side of the bed  the one near the telephone  God, in His infinite wisdom, was sparing Cory the shock of hearing such devastating news from a stranger. If there was to be bad news, it was to be cushioned by a loving daughter’s tact.

Cory, seeing the expression on her daughter’s face, asked Ballsy what the call was all about.

“Parang may nangyari ata,” was all Ballsy could tell her mother.

And the rest is history.

* * *

When Ninoy’s death was confirmed by a member of Japan’s Parliament, Cory asked her children for a few moments to herself and in her solitude, she wept for the loss of the man she had been married to and loved with all her heart for almost 30 years.

It was the most painful moment of her life  and Cory Aquino, then 50 years old, was no stranger to pain and suffering.

“We just cried. All of us,” the Philippines’ first woman president recalls. We are in a conference room in her office in Makati, a cheerful room full of family photos and paintings. We are leafing through a stack of albums, many of whose pictures bring a smile to Cory’s face. Since Aug. 21 was approaching, I asked her about the fateful day 20 years ago.

“Noynoy was also awake when the call from Kyodo came and he said, ’Mom, let’s not believe it because it’s just coming from TV.’ But when Congressman Shintaro Ishihara had called me up because Ninoy’s journalist friend Kiyoshi Wakamiya had called him up from Manila, I knew the news was for real.”

“I think in the beginning, naawa sa akin iyung mga wire agencies. At that time, the Boston bureau chief of the Associated Press was once based in the Philippines. When I was talking with him, he said, ‘I had not heard anything.’ But then Ishihara called…”

Back in Manila, Cory’s sisters and sisters-in-law had confirmation of Ninoy’s death, but none of them had the heart to break the news to Cory.

Ballsy, now Mrs. Eldon Cruz and the mother of two teenaged boys Justin Benigno (Jiggy) and Eldon Giulio (Jonty), recalls that in a way, the whole family was prepared for the worst. But one is never really prepared for the death of a loved one, no matter how one steeled oneself for the worst.

“We thought  we hoped  that Dad would just be imprisoned. From the moment he left Boston the whole family was tense,” she says. Several of the Aquinos’ Filipino friends in Boston would hear Mass with the family almost daily. They would also treat Cory and the kids to dinner, sometimes in restaurants with the most breathtaking of views.

“I would be thinking to myself then, how we would have appreciated the fantastic view more under different circumstances!” Ballsy shares.

* * *

Though Aug. 21, 1983 gave her the most pain, it was no longer the greatest trial of Cory Aquino’s life. Her spiritual backbone held up and she hurdled this one anew.

Cory thinks the two greatest trials she had to face as Ninoy Aquino’s wife were his hunger strike (his weight plummeted to 123 lbs.!) and his solitary confinement in Laur, Nueva Ecija in March 1973.

I asked her, “Was there a point when you told Ninoy, ‘I cannot take the suffering anymore’?”

“Never. Never,” she replies without a second thought. “And I never complained to him na hirap na hirap na ako, tumigil ka na. No. Never. Perhaps, if I had problems, financial problems like the others, maybe that would have made me weaker. But then, my parents (the late Jose Cojuangco and Demetria Sumulong) were very supportive. They could always have said, ‘Cory, tumigil na yang asawa mo, ha.’ But they did not although financially, we really went down.”

Cory, who became Ninoy’s bride when she was only 21 (he was barely 22 himself), believes Ninoy’s imprisonment “was our greatest learning experience.”

“I think the first lesson Ninoy’s imprisonment taught us was humility,” she once said. “Before martial law, it seemed to me there was no problem that Ninoy could not solve nor any challenge he could not overcome…”

And suddenly, he was so helpless. In Laur, Ninoy “felt so alone, so abandoned by men, so helpless in his plight that he gave up all faith in human devices… and fell back on our Lord.”

His becoming prayerful was what sustained Ninoy in the years that followed, Cory strongly believes.

“His worst really was in Laur. Parang he was ready to give up. But then, he was returned to Fort Bonifacio, and in time, he recovered. In his letter to Soc Rodrigo, he said that he had finally surrendered himself to the will of the Lord,” Cory says.

In that sense, Cory and Ninoy were alike. They both found peace in God’s will.

“During Ninoy’s incarceration, I prayed often for God to help me accept His will. And when I lost Ninoy, I prayed even harder for God to give me and my children the strength for it.”

(To be concluded)

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