Even for a figure as monumental as Cory Aquino’s, whose life and memory are deeply intertwined with our country’s, I am hard-pressed to find the words that can truly capture what she has meant to me.

I have never met her. I know her only in the sense that one knows a public figure by reading about her or seeing her on TV. In terms of being a real, tangible person in my life, I do not know Tita Cory.

But I do know her in terms of her work in shaping our history, and the fruits of that labor which we now enjoy. I know her by her speeches, her prayer rallies and her yellow ribbons. Most importantly, I know her through the fact that I am free to say No to Con-Ass and be out past ten at night.

I am acquainted with Tita Cory as an icon, a champion of democracy. Even after her term, she had somehow always been the stern and watchful mother of our young republic; the lurking, often uninvited, conscience of Philippine politics. In many important ways, she is a figure larger than life, towering and at the same time permeating our everyday existence.

Yet what makes Tita Cory most extraordinary was the fact that she remained ordinary.

Behind the accolades was a woman who had always seen herself as no more than an ordinary person, placed by Providence at the head of other ordinary people. She was simply a faithful wife, one who finished the work that her husband started. She was thrust violently into political leadership and accepted it, despite being derided for being nothing more than a plain housewife.

But our nation’s drama would have played out differently had this plain housewife rejected the part she was asked to play.

In the end, it will not mattered so much that she had made mistakes. It will not matter that her term’s first three years were marked by incessant attempts at military takeover. She will not have been nothing more than a transition president. History inevitably judges us by our results, but it is not these results that we will remember her by.

In Spanish, her first name means ‘heart’, and it was with heart that she presided over a fledgling democracy. It would be foolish to say now that Cory was ill-equipped for politics—she was born into a family that dealt exclusively with aristocrats and politicians. But despite the reality of realpolitik, she had remembered to make decisions based on her moral and ideological foundations.

She knew that her task was to revive a country, not to divide it among the armed and the powerful as spoils. In the process, she had been misunderstood and often misrepresented. She was also forced to make compromises, but in the end, she had ruled the nation, her stubborn and unruly child, in the best way that she knew how: as a stern but nurturing mother.

Tita Cory only did what she was tasked to do in the best way she knew how. To put it in that way makes it sound so simple, but in the course of our lives, this is all that we can ask of ourselves and most other people. To do what she had to do in the way she knew how was perhaps the most difficult thing of all.

But the legacy of Tita Cory is so much more than just our political institutions. It is more than the overthrow of an oppressive dictatorship or the freedoms that we now enjoy.

I believe that her greatest gift of all is that moment when she decided to fly from Cebu to join the crowds that had gathered in Metro Manila, for it was in that moment that she revived in us a sense of who we are and who we could be. Without that, we would never have shown the world that the struggle for freedom, though it comes at a high price, can be won without shedding a single drop of blood.

In offering herself, she had given us heart, and inspired us to offer our hearts to others. And it was only through heart that we were able to win back our nation.

Tita Cory had once said that freedom and democracy are really hard to come by, “and that it is mainly by perseverance that one is won and the other is kept.” And in a time where it is easy to lose sight of what he had fought for, it is most important for us to hold on to her gifts.

If we are to honor her memory, it will be by seeing to it that her efforts were not in vain.

When I found out that Michael Jackson died Friday morning, I was at the library, huddled over one of the computers with my blockmates as we waited for our readings. I immediately occupied another unit for myself and spent almost an hour reading about his death and what other people had to say about it. Some of my friends had much to say, and I didn’t know before then that I had peers who were hardcore fans. Even those who weren’t still paid tribute in their own little way, sparing a few words or popping his CD in the car.

It seemed like I was the only one who didn’t have anything to say. To the world, his death came as a violent tremor, the aftershocks of which were felt throughout the world wide web, causing sites to crash and search engines to overload. To me, it was just another death on the headlines. Initially, there is shock—he was a cultural icon, after all—but ultimately, it was something that I couldn’t relate to.

I was never an MJ fan. I was aware of his greatness, but I never had an experience of it. If anything, my awareness of it was peripheral—songs like Beat It and Smooth Criminal I only truly appreciated as covers by contemporary bands. Maybe the King of Pop could be considered as part of my generation, but in my life, it’s like he has always been on the outer fringes of it.

All my knowledge of Michael Jackson as a star and a person I owe to the few songs I have in my iTunes, and to what the media says about him. Maybe that’s unfortunate, because it was only in his latter years (the earlier parts of mine) that he had come to be portrayed as an eccentric lunatic with a history of pedophilia. He was always more Wacko Jacko to me than he was Michael Jackson. Unfortunately, we have always condemned people on the basis of how they appear or what we’ve heard about them.

But based on what I read about him now—funny how in death, all faults are forgiven, if temporarily—it seems that he has always been more the latter than the former. He was a person who found himself at odds with the world and the way he was to live within it. He was eccentric, not only because he purposefully took part in creating his own image, but also because he was judged by the way he chose to find his own happiness. In more ways than I can comprehend, Michael Jackson was complicated, conflicted, and largely misunderstood. I guess that’s the price you pay for such widespread fame.

But maybe the price was too high. I can’t help but relate to the fans out there who felt that he has always been victimized. Living a life under the public eye exerts tremendous pressures, and even more so when it judges you harshly. Michael Jackson started getting addicted to painkillers to deal with the stress of a bad image. Maybe it is sordidly fitting that he died after being injected by one.

The saddest thing of all is the way he had to go; he was a victim to the end. As a child, he was the victim of abuse. As a middle-aged man, he was the victim of disease. In his latter years, he was ultimately the victim of our very own condemnations. But finally, his demise came too early; his death stank of Elvis Presley.

He never had the chance to prove that he was a better man than we all thought. In the face of all the allegations and rumors spun against him, people often forget that he, too, had helped people overcome drug abuse. He, too, contributed funds to charities and hospitals. He, too, called for people to “heal the world, and make it a better place.”

Beyond this, it is through music that Michael Jackson most made a mark on the world. It is to him that the pop industry owes its revitalization. It is to him that performers such as Prince owe their initial and eventual success. It is to him that we all owe the channel that is MTV. And finally, it is to him that we owe Thriller and Billie Jean.

A sports pundit once said about the football legend Maradona: “The people who said terrible things about Maradona are the same people who forget that it is necessary to judge geniuses by their deeds and not by their life.”

If Michael Jackson lived as a performer, then perhaps it is most fitting to judge him by the way he has healed the world through his words and his music.

Rest in peace, Michael Jackson.

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