Vice President Leni Robredo shared that former President Benigno Aquino III offered to bury her husband, the late former Interior secretary Jesse Robredo, at the Libingan ng mga Bayani when he died on a plane crash in 2012.
Aquino told her then that there was a proposal to bury Jesse at the Heroes’ Cemetery in Taguig City and “he planned to approve the proposal.”
“I told him, that knowing my husband, he would prefer to be buried in Naga which was home to him and he would always want to be with his people,” Robredo said in a Facebook post Friday, June 25, in which she also tagged her three daughters.
“He said he would respect my decision but advised me to still give it some time and think it over. He did ask me again about two days after and my answer was still the same,” she added.
Robredo gave the account as she remembered the fateful days leading to the discovery of her husband’s body in the seas off Masbate on August 21, 2012, the death anniversary of Aquino’s father, democracy icon Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. Jesse died on August 18.
This recollection was triggered by the Facebook post of Raf Ignacio, one of Aquino’s executive assistants when he was still President. Ignacio posted a screencap of his journals from those days, remembering how Aquino personally consoled the Robredos.
READ: ‘Heartbreaking loss’: Robredo says Aquino a good friend, honest president
According to the vice president, a day before her husband’s body was found, Aquino gave her a sealed brown envelope and told her to open it only after Jesse’s body was retrieved.
“The following day, after Jesse’s body was found, I opened the envelope and, inside, was a document, several pages long. I tried reading it, but, in my grief, I could not understand what it was about. It looked like an official document coming from Malacañang,” Robredo recalled.
It turned out to be an official document indeed, proposing to bury her husband at the Heroes’ Cemetery, a designated resting place for Filipino soldiers, war veterans, and citizens considered as heroes and martyrs. Somebody in Aquino’s Cabinet thought that Jesse, having been a decorated local official, deserved to be interred there.
But it wasn’t just this offer that stuck to the vice president’s mind when she talked about those days when Aquino stood by her.
By the time the then Chief Executive went to their house in Naga City a day before Jesse’s body was found, “I already knew in my heart that Jesse was gone and I think PNoy did, too.”
“But he was very careful with his words. He was very reassuring and he said, just in case our worst fears happen, he will make sure that our girls will finish their studies,” Robredo remembered.
And while they were “touched” with the offer, the vice president said there was no need to because their eldest Aika was already working while Tricia, who was then a junior at the Ateneo de Manila University, was offered by an Ateneo Alumni High School Batch a full scholarship until she graduated.
Their youngest, Jillian, also became an academic scholar at the Philippine Science High School until she finished Senior High. Later on, she got a scholarship at the New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering to take up biomolecular science.
Over the years, Robredo said that Aquino had asked about the girls and how they were doing. He also sometimes sent food he thought the girls would like.
Robredo and her two daughters—Aika and Tricia—were seen at the Church of the Gesu in Ateneo de Manila University on Friday, June 25, to pay their respects to Aquino, who died of renal failure secondary to diabetes on Thursday, June 24. He was 61.