It was a miracle.

That was what Cory told me last February, shortly after Valentine?s Day, when she came to my mother?s wake. She came one early afternoon without fanfare, without any sirens blaring to announce her arrival. She slipped into the chapel quietly, where I met her, and she spent a few moments standing before the urn that held my mother?s ashes, praying. I will always remember that scene. I will always be grateful for it.

She looked good. You couldn?t believe that only a year before, she was in the embrace of a disease that was not known to let go. It was a miracle it did, she said, when she had settled into a pew. It was a miracle she was there.

She herself did not expect anything of the kind. Unbeknownst to the public, she said, her colon wasn?t her biggest problem. When her cancer was detected, it had already spread to her liver. Her doctors cut up a portion of it to prevent the disease from spreading. Though they gave hope, they were themselves not too hopeful. They gave her a few months to live.

She lived longer than that. Much, much longer than that.

A year later, there she was attending other people?s wakes. A year later, there she was, restored to health.

Since early last year, she said, her life had become a bonus. She thought she would go not long after that, and had been prepared to??handa na ako.? She had lived a full life, she had lived a fulfilled life. And she had lived a life that was offered to God, that yielded to the will of God. Heaven had decreed her life, heaven would decree her death. That she was still alive, that was the will of heaven. The doctors? skills notwithstanding, she would not be there but for the grace of God.

That was when I glimpsed the true miracle.

Cory has been compared to Joan of Arc, and it is true and not true at the same time. Both were ?walang alam,? Joan being a peasant?s daughter and Cory a housewife, who went on to shake the world. Both saw themselves as instruments of God and carried out epic achievements on earth with their unshakeable conviction of heaven. The difference is that Joan heard God?s voice in her head while Cory heard God?s voice only in her heart.

That is no mean difference. I myself have always been a little distrustful of people who hear God saying things to them. That has produced a lot of dead bodies, which is the bane of religion. The Spanish Inquisitors heard God talking to them, ordering them specifically to torture to death those who deviated from what they said God told the world to believe. William McKinley, too, heard God talking to him, ordering him specifically to seize the colonies owned by another country, Spain, which also believed God spoke to it, as a matter of manifest destiny. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, too, said God talked to her, ordering her to seize the presidency and hold on to it until further divine (God?s) or human (America?s) notice.

It?s true. You talk to God, you are pious. God talks to you, you are delusional. Or, God talks to you, you forge chains. You talk to God, you break free.

I never knew Cory all that well, but for all that I never heard her say in public or private that God spoke to her. All she said was that in her hour of doubt and uncertainty, in her hour of adversity and discouragement, in her hour of wavering and indecision, she always turned to prayer. She always turned to heaven for guidance. The pious will say that in those moments God truly spoke to her, though in mysterious ways, in the language of sign and symbols. The less pious will say that in those moments she merely plumbed the depths of her soul and found the truth in her heart, things we are all capable of doing as human beings, but which somehow only the more unflinching and courageous among us do.

I never heard Cory say she followed the marching orders of God. But her life at least, if not her words, is a testament to the faith she reposed her faith in. The way she comported herself in the face of power, showing the world the humility of power and the power of humility. The way she comforted herself in the face of oppression, discovering at the end of it the wounds of others and not just of self, the need to find justice for Ninoy, justice for all. The way she proved in life that the meek shall inherit the earth, and in death that, as Dylan Thomas said, death shall have no dominion.

Cory lived only five more months after we spoke. But so only in one sense, and probably in the scheme of things, a minor one. In the grand sense, she has lived longer than that. Much, much longer than that.

The explosion of tears and the shedding of praises for her these past days are proof of it. One is tempted to say that her spirit will live on long after the last trace of her body has disappeared, that her specter will continue to hover upon this land like a shadow. But it is more than that. It is that she will be a living presence among us. It is that she will be present among us.

Some lives are like that. They do not die. They do not die in ways that go beyond their thoughts continuing to influence people, their example continuing to inspire people, their memory continuing to cling to the minds of kin and friends. They do not die in ways not unlike those who are visited daily in their resting places by those who loved them indelibly deeply, who are kept company, who are caressed with words. They do not die because they remain a throbbing reality. They do not die because the detonation of the gigantic solidity of their lives scatters their atoms into the interstices of space, filling it, suffusing it, making themselves part of it. They do not die because they are, in every sense, still there.

Cory is one of them. What can one say?

It is a miracle.