FRANCISCO S. TATAD
I was out for a week when my friend, next-door neighbor and former Senate colleague, Miriam Defensor Santiago, died in her sleep at 71 on Thursday. I barely made it to her funeral mass at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Cubao yesterday. Friends and admirers all spoke of her brilliance, her wit, her courage, her ability to make people laugh at their own folly. Even my own young daughter said as much in a moving piece on Miriam in the Philippine Star on Saturday.