Leni to retrace Jesse’s last journey

As a way of commemorating the first death anniversary of good governance champion, Jesse Robredo, on Aug. 18, his widow and now Camarines Sur Rep. Leni Robredo would visit Cebu and Masbate, the last places the local government secretary was seen alive.

“I will have an emotional journey. I will retrace the last route he (Jesse) took before he died,” Leni said. The third-district lawmaker will be in Cebu on Aug. 15 and in Masbate on Aug. 17, and in Naga City for the simple commemoration ceremony on Aug. 18.

In Cebu, Leni would want to visit and talk to the family of Capt. Jessup Bahinting, the pilot of the ill-fated twin-engine Piper Seneca, and open a photo exhibit dedicated to her husband. In Masbate, she would grace a simple ceremony in memory of her husband and know the people who helped search the plane wreckage and the bodies of the three crash victims.

Leni would not exactly fly the same way her husband did almost a year ago. She confessed the family still feels the trauma of losing a loved one in a plane crash. “My children always have a fear of me traveling, especially in an airplane. I don’t want them to feel stressed.”

She said she would ride the fastcraft going to Masbate from Pilar Port, accompanied by the Naga officials who went to Masbate during the search operation.

“I don’t know if I can now bear to visit the crash site,” Leni said.

She said she had been planning to go to Masbate, but this never pushed through as she was not yet ready to be in the same place where Jesse died.

Leni said she was familiar with Masbate because she was assigned there in 2007 while working with the nongovernment organization Saligan.

She said she was ready to end her grieving period (“babang-luksa”) on the first death anniversary and start wearing clothes other than the black color.

The neophyte lawmaker said she did not expect President Aquino to mention Jesse in his State of the Nation Address (Sona) on July 22, but admitted that she was comforted by it.

“It was very comforting on my part, knowing that the relation between them (Jesse and Mr. Aquino) was not smooth sailing all throughout. It was unfortunate that by the time they came into terms, he (Jesse) was gone,” she said.

In his Sona, Mr. Aquino gave tribute to Robredo for his “skill, compassion and humility” which the President said were the reasons Robredo was recruited to the Cabinet.

At one point, the President blamed himself for recruiting Jesse because he said that if he had not asked him to join the Cabinet, “he would still be alive today.”

Leni said she had come to terms with the grief of losing her husband and expunging from her system the questions of “what if and what might have been.” She blamed nobody for Jesse’s demise.