It is all beginning to sink in. The expected end had come as a vertiginous surprise, and for many the first hours of mourning were spent in various degrees of bewilderment and disbelief—the disorientation of grief. Since then, however, many of us have begun to realize what it was, exactly, that we lost, when Cory Aquino passed into history.

We lost the international icon of people power. An Agence France Presse report out of Singapore quoted former Asean secretary general Rodolfo Severino’s perspective-setting remarks on the non-violent resistance that Cory symbolized. “I think that what happened in the Philippines is not being given enough credit for the overthrow of authoritarian regimes elsewhere in the world like in Eastern Europe and within the Soviet Union itself and elsewhere in Asia,” Severino said. “People seem to forget that this wave of enlarged freedoms was really pioneered by the Philippines.” It is true that Jaime Cardinal Sin was the one who sounded the trumpet, but in truth the people—in the millions—who converged on EDSA (Epifanio delos Santos Avenue) during those four glorious days in February 1986 were Cory’s yellow army. And the entire world knew it.

The amnesia that has since overcome us, and the world with it, can be explained by many factors, but Cory’s long, public suffering and her death have made us remember again, and reminded us of our best selves.

We lost a political exemplar. It is now conventional wisdom to say that Cory Aquino was no politician, that she was a “mere” housewife thrust into a political role. But we think this is a misreading of both her character and our history. She was certainly heavily involved in the political work required to rebuild a democracy. She may have been somewhat reluctant about certain aspects of the political side of the presidency, but once committed she was always resolute. She wore the longest coattails in Philippine history—causing the election of an entire army of Cory’s Candidates in three elections, including 22 out of 24 senators in 1987 and her successor as president in 1992—and she knew it. But she exercised this unparalleled power with great discretion.

She could have run again for a second term; the Feb. 7, 1986 Snap Election was conducted under the Marcos Constitution, and her takeover of Malacañang on Feb. 25, 1986 was a revolutionary act—and yet she refused to even entertain the notion that she was politically indispensable and therefore should run again. As we have already written, Cory was the only president who never sought to stay in office a day longer than necessary. She was an inspiring example of the politician who could say No.

We lost the country’s most famous martyr. It is astonishing to consider that Cory was a widow for almost as long as she was a wife. Indeed, if we subtract the seven years Ninoy Aquino spent in Marcos’ prisons, we realize, with a start, that she spent more years away from her husband, a martyr in his cause, than with him. She bore the responsibility of raising their children during their most impressionable years mostly by herself; she took up the cross of widowhood without complaint; she accepted the impossible task of unifying a fractious and fear-ridden opposition to fight an all-powerful dictatorship despite it being against her best interests—for what could have been easier after Ninoy’s funeral than to go back to Boston, Massachusetts, the scene of the happiest years of her life, and reclaim the ordinariness of a normal life?

It is this spirit of self-sacrifice, of the abnegation that cannot be understood without reference to her profound spiritual life, that raises Cory’s life out of class and gender and education and connects it with the Holy Week-framed narrative that binds our nation of martyrs.

We lost the mother of our democracy. Cory was not a perfect president; on the issue of retaining the American military bases, for instance, she saw the matter from a perspective that was the exact opposite of this newspaper’s. On that issue, we believe she was on the wrong side of history. But when it became clear to her that her role in history was to restore freedom to a people “worth dying for,” she did not flinch or waver: joyfully campaigning against Marcos, serenely assuming control of a sprawling government, determinedly restoring institution after democratic institution. She came to serve democracy, not to subvert it.