Cory Aquino, 76

Cory in 2006

DEMOCRACY ICON AND former President Corazon Aquino passed away early Saturday morning after a yearlong battle with cancer. She was 76.

Cory, as she was better known, was the former housewife who battled a former strongman, rightist coup plotters, a festering insurgency, and separatist moro rebels, all the while sheperding the country through its first few years of democracy.

The widow of former Senator Benigno Aquino was thrust into the Presidency by the Edsa People Power Revolution in 1986 as a unifying candidate for a heavily fragmented opposition. She was, at once, derided by both then-President Marcos and her own partymates as a plain housewife who would not know what to do in Malacanang.

In the end, Aquino survived more than seven coup attempts to pass on the torch for a newly restored democracy to a fellow EDSA hero, Fidel Ramos.

She leaves behind five children, and an entire nation in grief.