OUR family dinner chitchat faded when evening news TV panned on the frail lady. Leaning on her children’s arms, a gaunt Corazon Aquino shuffled into the hospital. She has refused further chemotherapy for colon cancer.

Aquino, 76, became the first woman president of the Philippines, as well as in Asia. In that unsought role, she won numerous awards.

For ordinary citizens, like us, Cory was more.

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She was the quiet woman thrust into leadership, first by the dictatorship’s murder of her husband, Benigno Aquino, now a national hero, then by people’s clamor. “Ninoy? He’s nobody,” Ferdinand Marcos sneered. Dared on a Ted Koppel interview, he called for snap election. Would Cory oppose him? “The place of women is in the bedroom.”

“A nation of 60 million cowards and a son-of-a-bitch,” was how a US senator described the Philippines. Murder, jail, threats and bribes of what Imelda Marcos boasted was the “New Society” cowed us--until Cory stood up.

Then, ordinary Filipinos rose too. And People Power triggered Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution,” Lebanon’s “Cedar Revolt” to Ukraine’s “Orange” Revolution.”

Filipinos thrust Malacañang on her. Unlike Ferdinand Marcos, Joseph Estrada and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, she didn’t scheme to retain power. When her term ended, she returned to her modest home on Times Street, untainted by sleaze.

“What is the price of a valiant woman?” asks the Book of Proverbs. “Her value is far beyond pearls.” Thus, Carmelite nuns hid her in their Cebu monastery when Marcos agents sought her as Edsa 1 gathered steam.

We owe Cory. Those who criticize her do so under liberties she led people in restoring. We need recall how much that IOU is even as we pray for her.

“Why did (People Power) happen?,” she asked in 2000. “When did Filipinos decide-–each one alone and without prodding-–that it was now or never? Suddenly, they were there, standing tall like Ninoy, as he went down the stairs to his death because it is better to die in that posture than to go on living on your knees…

”Inside, all true Filipinos sense there is a point beyond which wrongdoing can not be allowed to go on. That point is when they will take action. Hence, the instantaneous reaction to those few simple words: Tama na. Sobra na. Palitan na.

“There is a dark wind blowing across our country again-–the wind of ambition, the wind of tyranny,” she warned on martial law’s 25th anniversary. “We tell those who want to stay in power by martial law or Charter change: no way and never again…We are here not merely to fight Charter change for term extensions…We are here also to fight the old amnesias.

“The presidency is so great an honor, no one deserves to have it again. It imposes a duty so important-–to guide a whole country and protect a whole nation–-that you must do it well. And if you did it well, you won’t deserve do it again…

“Finally, to the man I supported in 1992, my friend Fidel Valdez Ramos, I say: Marami ka nang nagawa, kaibigan kong Presidente. Marami ka nang maaring ipagamalaki. We both know that the real saviors of this country are the people, not any one of us.

“Trust the good people to continue your good work. I trusted in you when my term was over. Trust in the Filipino.”

Fidel Ramos got the message. He scrapped his bid to rewrite the Constitution and seek a second term. Cory may gently fade into the night, sooner rather than later. Paradoxically, her message gathers strength. Will President Arroyo heed it?