My father is over 75 years old and lives alone… but every month he pays almost 1,000USD for electricity. I’ve asked him many times to save energy, but he doesn’t listen to me.
My father is seventy-five years old and has been living alone in a small town in Batangas province since my mother passed away three years ago.
Despite his age, he is still strong. He grows his own vegetables in the backyard, cooks for himself, and every morning he rides his bicycle to the town market.
I live in Manila. Although I try to visit him whenever I can, the truth is that work and city life often consume my time. Sometimes I only go home for a weekend, then head back right away.
Last week, while checking the Meralco app, I saw his name on the list of registered users.
Monthly bill: 998 USD
I stared at the screen for several seconds, thinking I might have read it wrong.
How could this happen?
Only an old man lives in that house.
He doesn’t have an air conditioner.
He doesn’t have a washing machine.
He doesn’t have an electric water heater.
He doesn’t even use a microwave.
Yet his electricity consumption is higher than that of my own house in the city.
I immediately called him.
“Dad, what’s happening with your electricity bill?” I asked.
“I don’t know, son… maybe Meralco made a mistake,” he answered calmly.
“It’s not just this month! I checked — you’ve been paying more than four thousand dollars for several months now!”
“Maybe it’s our old refrigerator… you know those things consume a lot of electricity.”
His tone was evasive, as if he didn’t want to talk about it.
That annoyed me even more.
My father has always been frugal. The type who reuses plastic bags, saves screws “just in case they might be useful someday,” and even fixes broken light bulbs instead of buying new ones. I couldn’t believe he had suddenly become careless.
I thought maybe he was more forgetful than I wanted to admit.
So I decided to visit him and find out for myself what was going on.
On Saturday afternoon, I drove nearly two hours from Manila to our town.
The road, surrounded by dry fields, plants, and wild flowers, once again led me to the old house where I grew up.
It was still there, just as before: the paint on the walls slightly peeling, the galvanized iron roof old, but clean, neat, and filled with a special kind of silence that can only be found in a house missing someone dearly loved.
My father greeted me at the gate with a peaceful smile. His hands were still covered in soil because he had just finished watering the plants.
“Good thing you still remember your old father,” he said with a smile.
“Yes, Dad… I missed coming home too.”
I hugged him, but while we were talking, I secretly scanned the house with my eyes, looking for an explanation for the unusually high electricity consumption.
I saw nothing unusual.
Just a small electric fan,
an old television with a big back,
an old blender,
and a slightly rusty electric kettle.
That was all.
There was only one thing that caught my attention:
at the end of the hallway, there was a room that was closed and padlocked.
I asked what was inside.
He answered without really looking at me:
“That’s your mother’s room. Her things are there… memories, clothes, some boxes. Nothing important.”
I didn’t push further.
But that night, I noticed some strange things.
The lights in the living room and hallway stayed on all night.
I thought he had just forgotten to turn them off, but the next day it was the same.
When I asked him, he said:
“My eyesight isn’t clear in the dark anymore. I’m afraid of tripping.”
His answer seemed reasonable… but it wasn’t enough explanation.
The following day, while he was sleeping in the hammock in the backyard, I checked the electricity meter.
I felt a chill.
The disk was still spinning very fast.
It wasn’t an exaggeration.
It wasn’t a system error.
It wasn’t Meralco cheating.
The house really was consuming a huge amount of electricity.
An idea entered my mind.
What if something was connected in my mother’s room that ran day and night?
A portable air conditioner?
A heater?
An old appliance he was hiding so I wouldn’t interfere?
I asked him again, but he avoided the question once more.
That was when I got really angry.
I felt like he was hiding something from me.
And even worse — it felt like he was fooling me.
Before I left, I secretly wrote down the meter number.
While on the road back to Manila, I called an acquaintance who works at Meralco.
“Can you temporarily disconnect the electricity at my father’s house for a few days?” I said. “I think he has something connected that he won’t admit. I’m worried it might be dangerous.”
He chuckled a bit and replied:
“If the owner agrees, we can report it as a preventive check due to a possible internal issue, then temporarily cut the power.”
I immediately agreed, without thinking twice.
At that moment, I was sure I was doing the right thing.
That I was protecting him from harm.
That I was fulfilling my duty as a good son.
I just never imagined…
that after only a few days, I would receive a call that would shake me to my core.
To be continued…
Three days later, while I was in the middle of an important meeting at the office, I received a call from an unknown number. I answered it, and the voice on the other line was from a firefighter in our town.
“Sir, your father’s house is on fire. But before you panic, your father is safe… he’s just in the hospital because he inhaled a bit of smoke.”
I almost dropped my pen. “How? How did it catch fire when there’s no electricity?”
“That’s exactly what we’re wondering about. According to the neighbors, ever since the electricity was cut off the other day, your father started lighting many candles inside your mother’s room. He apparently fell asleep and one of the candles fell over.”
I hurriedly drove back to Batangas. When I arrived at our house, my world collapsed. The part that burned was my mother’s room — the room that had been padlocked for so long.
I found my father in the hospital, sitting in a wheelchair and staring into the distance. When he saw me, he didn’t get angry. Instead, he cried with deep pain.
“I’m sorry, son… I couldn’t save your mother,” he sobbed.
The Secret Inside the Room
When I returned to the burned house to see if anything could still be salvaged, that was when I discovered the truth. In the middle of the ashes, I saw burned wires and the remains of five large industrial-grade dehumidifiers and electric heaters.
I spoke with our neighbor, Aling Nena. That was when I learned everything.
“Didn’t you know, son? Before your mother died, she had severe asthma and mold allergy. She loved the smell of dry clothes and fresh air. When she passed away, your father couldn’t accept it. He didn’t want to lose your mother’s ‘scent’ in the house.”
“So he filled every corner of the room with heaters and dehumidifiers that ran 24/7 just so the things wouldn’t get damp, so the clothes wouldn’t grow mold, and so your mother’s scent would remain ‘alive’ inside that room. That’s why his electricity bill was so high. He was paying for electricity just so he could still feel that his wife was there.”
The Sacrifice
My knees went weak. The 1,000 USD I had been complaining about every month was the price my father was willing to pay so he wouldn’t drown in his overwhelming loneliness. In my desire to save money and “show concern,” I had turned off the only thing keeping him happy — the illusion that my mother was still with him.
When I returned to the hospital, I hugged my father tightly.
“Dad, I’m sorry. I was the one who had the electricity disconnected,” I confessed while sobbing.
He looked at me and stroked my head. “I know, son. I knew you noticed the meter. Maybe… this is also a sign that I really need to say goodbye to her. I’ve been too selfish with her memory.”
From then on, I brought my father to Manila. He no longer lives alone, and there is no more 1,000 USD electricity bill. But every night, when I see him staring out the window, I know that no matter how much we save on material things, there are memories that cannot be measured by any amount — and the most expensive electricity in the world is the light that comes from a heart that still doesn’t want to let go.
THE END.
