THERE is a stillness about Dolly Borlongan that is deceiving. She might be sharing a painful experience with her Healing Circles grief support group, or totally lost in a frenzied boogie on the dance floor. But always there is that center of unshakeable inner quiet.

It belies where she has been. The poise and grace are no indicators of the soul wrenching and heartbreak that have been her family?s lot after the much publicized suicide in April 2005 of their paterfamilias Teodoro Borlongan, former president of Urban Bank. Borlongan shot himself after reportedly waging a lonely legal battle to clear his name in connection with Urban Bank, which the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) closed down in April 2000. It was placed under receivership with the Philippine Deposit Insurance Corp. (PDIC) the same month and was later acquired by the Export and Industry Bank. Borlongan had filed several cases against the BSP, PDIC and other government agencies all the way to the Supreme Court, but they were dismissed.

It has been four years since the suicide and almost a decade after the Borlongans? dramatic passage from being a happy growing family into being the focus of public flogging. Now they hope to move on from the shoals of grief into healing.

Dolly?s quietude is not passivity, because she is present in the moment. But it is a surface calm, she admits. ?No one sees me cry, and I?ve never asked for help even when I was clueless on what to do when Ted died,? she recalls. ?I wanted the kids to feel safe and secure, to know that I would take care of things. I had to be strong for them. None of the bank directors offered to help when it happened and this hurt a lot. ?

Suicide made Ted?s death much more excruciating. The taboo prevails. The stigma is as much on the victim as on the kin left behind. However, when Dolly began her public sharing about the tragedy at church meetings, she was swamped with calls from people whose loved ones were suicidal or had actually gone on to kill themselves. She feels that her experience has touched others and helped them on. At the same time, coming out has helped in her healing because now she knows that so many others are depressed and in despair, but can still be helped.

The grief passage for Dolly began, ironically enough, with the impressive success of Urban Bank which she says, her husband had nurtured from being a nondescript development bank in 1980 to a respected and much awarded commercial bank. Ted received the Ten Outstanding Young Men award for domestic banking in 1993.

In February, 2000, Dolly recalls, the Bangko Sentral cited the bank for its ?solvency, liquidity and management.? However, two months later, the same Bangko Sentral would order Urban Bank summarily closed for ?illiquidity,? she says. This, she adds, despite the bank having in its coffers almost P2 billion when it was closed, while UrbanCorp had almost P322 million in liquid assets.

What happened in that two-month window between the Central Bank commendation and its closure order?, she asks.

Dolly has her own take on the corporate change that would eventually take the life of her husband. The bank, she says, had attracted investors and depositors, drawn by its success. This included very powerful people who made it known that this juicy plum should fall into their basket. ?Thus began a corporate unraveling where one innocent man was left holding it together against the forces that sought to destroy what had been built," contends Dolly.

The family paid dearly for the crisis, she adds. ?The children were harassed in school as the headlines screamed accusations against their father. Our family became the catch-all for the conflict and tension; we became dysfunctional. One son became accident-prone, another flunked out of school, and at one time or another, my youngsters had tried to take their lives by slashing their wrists.?

One daughter opted to escape it all. Kathy, the eldest, won a scholarship in the Sorbonne in Paris, and left against her parents? wishes. ?Kate would survive by waitressing and taking odd jobs that she balanced with her studies. Ted did not want her to leave so she had to fend for herself,? Dolly recalls . For her part, she sought refuge in her parish, the Christ the King church in Greenmeadows, Quezon City. She took on multiple tasks and so many roles that Msgr. Jaime Mora laughingly recounts: ?The only thing she didn?t do was say Mass.?

Things came to a head when the multitude of court cases filed by the Bangko Sentral pushed Ted into a corner where he found himself alone. In his journal, he wrote: ?Since that fateful day on April 26, 2000 when Urban Bank was ordered closed, I never felt so much pain and burden--to have fallen so low, to have everything taken away, and to be the object of such huge injustice and humiliation. I remember it was sometime in May when our family was together during dinner at home, that I broke down for the first and only time in front of you. And I said, ?Remember this, despite what your classmates or anyone will tell you, Daddy did not steal. Believe in Daddy, even if others don?t believe me.?

Recounts Dolly: ?He felt abandoned by his colleagues and we, his family, also had to bear the pain.? Ted, she adds, was brought up to value integrity and that became his way of doing business.

An Ateneo alumnus from prep to college, Ted graduated cum laude from the Economics Honors Program in 1978. He was president of the Ateneo Photographers Society, corps commander of the ROTC and president of the Economics Society.

Dolly met Ted when they worked together at another commercial bank. Though she was engaged to be married to someone else, Ted would go with her to daily Mass and send her flowers daily ?until I broke off with my fiancée and agreed to marry him,? she recalls. ?Though he was such a workaholic, he would always find time to spend with me. He never traveled without me, whether here or out of the country and would always take me with him on his business trips.?

He was a great father, his widow reveals, but Urban Bank was his baby, his firstborn.

Unfortunately, the affection, it seems, was not reciprocated. ?Nothing seems to have come about after Ted?s suicide. It seems he died in vain,? says Dolly. ?He wanted to be vindicated but the Supreme Court repeatedly dismissed the cases he had filed that would have cleared him and Urban Bank, which was summarily closed during Holy Week. The court denied the appeal with finality days after he died. The copy of the appeal (along with a farewell letter) was in the truck with him, splattered with his blood. He had hoped for Easter. But until now, we wait in vain.?