What mother would not want only the best and the most secure life for her children? Some mothers would do everything and anything possible to ensure that her child would be given a comfortable future as they pass this earth.
For professor emeritus Dr. Josefina Solis Cornelio, her best legacy for her children is an autobiography that chronicles almost 39 years of dedicated, loyal service to Silliman University whom she considers as her “second alma mater.” Dr. Cornelio passed just a few months ago at 88. Since August is Founders Month at Silliman University, we likewise remember those who have given the best years of their lives to this 124-year-old higher education institution.
The book, aptly titled Great is Your Faithfulness, gives 35 anecdotal presentations of the various men and women who have touched her life and those she had touched in return. It begins and ends with reflections or quotations with some taken from the Bible, others from classic literature, as well as speeches delivered by eminent personalities.
But the significance of the book, which was launched in one Founders Day celebration also in August, does not end there. At the time Dr. Cornelio wrote the book, she was 73. But, it is not just her sharp memory that would amaze us, as shared by her husband, Atty. Martiniano Cornelio (who has since passed, a victim of a gruesome murder), but moreso her overflowing love and concern for a son whom she thinks may not be able to fend for himself when the time comes.
Thus, she thought of coming out with this autobiography. With a cover price of Ps 1,000 the money generated out of the sales, according to Dr. Cornelio, would go to a trust fund for Mark (one of her four sons) who, incidentally, has also come out with a book of his own poems as well as participated in exhibits featuring his art works. Mark, too, has gone to the Great Beyond ahead of his mother, which was Dr. Cornelio’s unabashed wish, understandably so. As she would always tell friends and colleagues, “Who would take care of Mark if I went ahead?”
One account, as she recalled in one article, was when she was approached by one of the many American missionary teachers in Silliman University, Mrs. Weldy. The latter asked what she is doing with her “very bright son Josemar.” When Dr. Cornelio asked what the matter was, whether he was misbehaving in classes or anything close to that, she was informed by Mrs. Weldy that her son is “hard of hearing.”
“I was dumbfounded; I had had no idea,” said Dr. Cornelio. She said she recalled Dr. Eusebio Kho, a medical doctor assigned at the then Silliman Mission Hospital (now Silliman Medical Center Foundation, Inc.), who prescribed streptomycin to Joey, the eldest among her five children. At that time, Dr. Kho told her and her husband that they have to choose between saving their son’s lung or making him hard of hearing with the medicine.
While her husband was away for about six months to prepare for his bar exams in Manila, they thought it safer for them to share an apartment with a couple. They did not know then that the husband had advanced tuberculosis. By then, Joey had contracted some form of tubercular lung infection, and at that time there was no effective alternate anti-TB medication of less toxic nature.
“My husband and I chose to save our son’s life,” she recalls. Perhaps, Joey’s hard of hearing must have come in very gradually because he could speak and comprehend English well by the time of the discovery of his hearing difficulty.
Mrs. Weldy showed her two sets of scores of Joey – one when the questions were given before the whole class and another, when the questions were given to him alone. “What a contrast there was in Joey’s scores,” enthused Dr. Cornelio.
He definitely would need a tutor, as advised by Mrs. Weldy. Ever the devoted teacher that she was, and a concerned mother at that, Dr. Cornelio assured Mrs. Weldy that she would tutor Joey herself. Mrs. Weldy, who was a reading specialist, advised further to just make sure her son would not be embarrassed.
True enough, Dr. Cornelio tutored Joey from Grade III up to his fourth year in high school. When she met the Weldys years later in their home in Indiana, USA, Mrs. Weldy asked her what approach she adapted in dealing with her son’s hearing predicament and his being enrolled in a mainstream curriculum like that of Silliman University.
Dr. Cornelio said she made a plea with all his teachers every beginning of each school year to write his assignments on slips of paper and to leave them with the school secretary for her to retrieve after the end of the afternoon classes.
Joey has since then passed two government licensure examinations – for teachers and for librarians. He served as Assistant Acquisitions Librarian for the Silliman University Main Library. “My husband and I consider Joey a product of the dedication and compassion of the Filipino teachers, by the early American missionaries, and the concern and frank appraisal of the doctors who attended to him,” Dr. Cornelio shares.
National Artist for Literature and Dumaguete resident Dr. Edith Lopez Tiempo, who wrote the book’s introduction, put it very succinctly in her observation: “As her former mentor, and later as her colleague, and as always her friend and personal confidante, I do sometimes wonder if her resolute concentration on the positive is a deliberately chosen outlook rather than an intrinsic trait. If a deliberate choice, she is more to be admired because somewhere in these memoirs she has hinted of at least one deeply troubled area of her life which she has bravely carried and continues to carry with great faith and equanimity.” | NWI
