Heroes (2)

There are three other heroes, whom I know through some affiliation with their children.

Noynoy Aquino, now senator, was a classmate at the Ateneo de Manila University. He once invited me to join him on a weekend visit to his father. With awe, I had been able to watch on TV the only man with the temerity to insult the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in his confrontational speeches. Unfortunately for me, when I gathered the courage to want to personally visit this hero, he already had a heart attack and his whole family left for the United States for his cardiac operation. When he came back, Ninoy Aquino was executed on the airport tarmac.

There was also another classmate at UP College of Law, Chel Diokno, who once related to me his visits to his father, the great Pepe Diokno. Pepe Diokno and Ninoy Aquino were the only political detainees incarcerated in solitary confinement at Nueva Ecija. Chel told me that Pepe Diokno had grown so thin in detention that he kept on holding the back of his pants so that it would not fall. Pepe Diokno was my mother’s lawyer and I had heard him speak so eloquently at lectures delivered in UP.

Another classmate, Atty. Gwendolyn Pimentel-Gana, related to me her family life as she visited her father, who was detained four times during the Marcos dictatorship. Those were difficult years for the Pimentel family. Today, through Gwen, I have done some consultancies on her father’s bills on children’s rights. I have been privileged with these surrogate and actual brushes with national heroes, who have sacrificed so much for our nation. – Eric Mallonga; ericfmallonga@yahoo.com