She taught me that the secret ingredient of all is always love.

Gale Araniego
May 6, 2021
3 min read

I am beyond grateful and beyond blessed to be your granddaughter. Thank you for giving me the privilege to grow up feeling like a princess — not for the fancy clothes, the food, or the house we lived in but simply because I was raised by a queen.

To my Inay Letty, Thank you for giving me an infinite Love Story to tell and to write.

If I will make a list of all the people I looked up to, my Inay Letizia Basilan will be on my top list. Among the obvious things, just the fact that she brought up and keep up with two different generations of teenagers in her prime time certainly deserves to be on the top of the pedestal. Woohoo, I salute you Inay!

She’s one of the most remarkable women I know. Kaka—as most of the folks in Concepcion calls her is a very loving woman. I know that firsthand since most of my childhood is without my Mom and my Dad but I barely noticed that because she filled our love tank with all the love she has it even overflows.

I never saw her raising us up as a chore nor a job. She’s just simply being who she is — our Inay.

She's so fierce — you just can't sugarcoat stuff with her. A tough one indeed — she lost her mother when she was so young, lost her husband too soon, stayed and took care of her second mother until her last breath all this while she was able to sustain her family with her self owned sari-sari store and sent her three kids to college all by herself. Growing up, I have the definition of hard-work attached with her name because oh boy how much she works. She's always earlier than a morning person. I remember waking up and she already prepared our breakfast and going to sleep while she's still wide awake conversating with the numbers of the day.

She’s clever and wise, the heart and the backbone of our family, our leader even if by now she often forgets what she ate five minutes ago. Her core value is like a lamp — you will never go astray. I wish I always followed her lead but just as she often says, I have my own path to pursue and I’d better walk on it. She taught me that whenever comes to life, family comes first.

She’s my northern light — the kind of woman I strive to be.

She told me the truth about tooth fairy and Santa Claus. The who beyond the term "sipay" and that the monsters under my bed are nothing more than accumulated dust and task, both I needed to face. But most of all, she taught me that I can talk to God —everywhere, anyhow and whenever I want. That His love is never confined inside the wall of the church, that HE hears and sees everything, that God never blinks. She told me that prayer doesn't change God, but it does change us.

I remember I was 8yrs old, standing in front of the airport for the first time and she told me. When your Mom turned her back, don't try to call her and don’t cry. I did what she told me. And I believe that the same comforting words she whispered to me were the very same thing she told my Mom when she left to cross the ocean to give us a stable future — I am here.

As the days turned to nights and the nights turned to days — there were more than scars and bruises along the way and though I’d prefer they were all from scrapped knees, life as we know it — doesn't always work that way. One thing I am sure though, all these years, she certainly made the difficult times easier. A thank you will never be enough.

Growing up I saw it in her eyes, that the path to a meaningful life is by being useful, honorable and compassionate. That finding your purpose is less than what you want but more on what you give. That I should be more aware of how I talk to myself because confidence is a skill one can learn and that there is mastery in repetition. She taught me how to be always grateful for having what I need and put into work for the things that I want.