Last week, throngs of mourners filled the streets of Manila to pay respects to their deceased leader, former President Corazon Aquino. Filipinos remember Corazon as the woman behind the People Power Movement that succeeded longtime leader Ferdinand Marcos.

Although he’s not Filipino, Evanston writer Jeff Kelly Lowenstein says his life will be forever linked to the political career of Corazon Aquino. She inspired his mother who suffered from aphasia, a disorder that impairs language comprehension…

Mom’s voice was scratchy and rough. “And then Corazon,” she said, then started to cry.

I looked down at her in the hospital bed, trying to understand what she meant. It wasn’t pretty.

The head on collision with another car had happened just a week earlier.  In addition to broken ribs, a shattered collarbone and a two purple shiners, Mom sustained a massive closed head injury.

She had the type of aphasia whereby she used words’ most personal meaning, with little, if any connection, to how other understand those same words.

For Mom in the hospital, G-d was brillo.

Pain was in the negative.

And Corazon meant heart and hope. 

I looked at the television at the end of Mom’s bed.  Thousands of Phillipinos were standing up against the oppressive, decades long rule of Ferdinand Marcos and his compulsive shoe purchasing wife Imelda.

Their leader was the widow of slain opposition leader Benigno Aquino. Their leader was Corazon.  

Mom’s particular form of brain scrambling meant that she could draw on smatterings of five languages she spoke to varying degrees before her accident.

She remember the Latin name of the tree that survived the smog outside her hospital bed room. When I asked her, “Comme ca va,” in French, she replied without hesitation, “Tres bien, merci.  Et vous?”

Her Brooklyn accent returned with a vengeance

Although Mom did not speak Spanish, she somehow grasped the seismic cultural and political shift that was happening thousands of miles away and connected deeply to the widow of the dictator’s assassinated opponent.  

Mom has lived with heart and hope in the 23 years since her accident, continuing to heal, writing prodigious amounts of poetry and prose, and working to help other people live, in her words, a vital, active life after trauma.

Mom turned 72 on August 3, just two days after the former president died following a valiant battle with colon cancer.   She uses a walker now, due to persistent pain in her right hip.

She says it’s easier and more comfortable some days to stay still, but forces herself to get up and stretch because she knows that her movement will be even more limited if she doesn’t.

And, as she lifts herself from her bed and starts the arduous task of preserving her remaining mobility, she continues to draw strength from the former housewife whose name means heart and who took up the mantle from her late husband to lead a nation.


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