A “great teacher, my teacher.”
This was how former senator and now Taguig City Rep. Pia Cayetano recalled, between sobs, her memories of the late Senate President Edgardo “Edong” Angara during the necrological rites at the Senate.
“Where do I begin to tell the story of Senator Ed Angara?” an emotional Cayetano said when she delivered her eulogy during the necrological services for the late senator on Wednesday.
She said her stories of Angara, also known as Sedja (Senator Edgardo J. Angara), started when the latter and her father, late Senator Renato Cayetano, were friends and partners in ACCRA Law office.
“He was Uncle Ed to me and Edja, without the “S” for Sedja and without the “P” for Pedja (President Edgardo J. Angara) and we spent every summer in their beach house in Nasugbu,” Cayetano said.
Angara was president of University of the Philippines. Cayetano said she and the late senator were regents of UP.
“He would always laugh when I mentioned in hearings and meetings that we entered UP together—me as a freshman and he as the UP president. He’d say: ‘Pinapatanda mo naman ako,’” she recalled their conversation.
As she was about to end her eulogy, Cayetano turned emotional again.
“To the Angara family, Filipino grieve because we’ve lost a humble and dedicated statesman, a great teacher, my teacher and a visionary. But my family, we grieve with you…” she said.
Cayetano said her family was close to Angara that one of her siblings — Leno Edgardo — was named after him.
“We grieve with you. But know this, Edja, Sedja, Pedja and the many ways he was known, Encle Ed to me, we live on through the work that we do and that of many others he had mentored and inspired,” Cayetano said. /jpv
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