The sudden death of Press Secretary Cerge Remonde shows the immense burden he was carrying for President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

And if he was this distressed, how much more President Arroyo.

We won’t know until years from now if and when she issues an autobiography.

But this much I do know.

Elpidio Quirino, whose scandal-ridden administration has often been compared to hers, disclosed his own agony in the dying days of his presidency.

When Ayala Museum was given custody of Quirino’s presidential papers I was privileged to be tapped to write his uncensored biography based on his papers.

It’s entitled To fight without end: the story of a misundersood president and is available in the national library of Australia.

I found out that when Quirino ran for reelection in May 1953 against the highly popular Ramon Magsaysay – who won by 1.5 million votes – Quirino confessed that “mysterious chills, fevers and vomiting”  suddenly came upon him.

The affliction dogged him and became quite unbearable. Two months later in July he had to undergo surgery twice – July 8 and July 25 – at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. He had a heart ailment, gout and ulcers.

We have not been told the true state of the incumbent Arroyo’s physical health.

One reporter who was invited to eat with her inside the presidential palace personally narrated to me afterwards that Mrs. Arroyo had asked an aide to bring to the table a certain drug, which the reporter recognized was a painkiller.

President Arroyo must be under even more pressure than Remonde, now that her back is against the wall.

Whenever I think of her nowadays, I remember Shakespeare’s portrayal of King Henry IV, who wailed about his insomnia saying:  “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown/ Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”

I often wonder – how does she sleep?

For those who want to savor Henry IV’s entire soliloquy, here it is below. Part of the secret of reading Shakespeare is that you don’t have to know the meaning of all the words to appreciate him. Just let yourself be carried away by the lilt of the language and the tidal wave of emotion that the words evoke.

KING HENRY IV:

How many thousand of my poorest subjects
Are at this hour asleep! O sleep, O gentle sleep,
Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?
Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs,
Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee
And hush’d with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber,
Than in the perfumed chambers of the great,
Under the canopies of costly state,
And lull’d with sound of sweetest melody?
O thou dull god, why liest thou with the vile
In loathsome beds, and leavest the kingly couch
A watch-case or a common ‘larum-bell?
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the ship-boy’s eyes, and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge
And in the visitation of the winds,
Who take the ruffian billows by the top,
Curling their monstrous heads and hanging them
With deafening clamour in the slippery clouds,
That, with the hurly, death itself awakes?
Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose
To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude,
And in the calmest and most stillest night,
With all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king? Then happy low, lie down!
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.