I am ninety-four years old and I remember cash. I remember the feel of paper bills — not the modern replicas they sell as novelties, but real paper currency, worn soft from a thousand hands, each bill carrying the ghost of every person who held it before you. I remember coins: the weight of them in your pocket, the sound they made when you dropped them into a jar, the cold metal reality of money you could touch and count and hold against your chest when the world felt uncertain. I remember the jar on my grandmother's kitchen counter, filled with loose change, and how she would let me count it on Saturday mornings. I remember that money had texture.

The transition happened when I was 64. The Great Conversion. Thirty days to exchange every physical dollar for Quanta. Thirty days to take a lifetime of accumulated cash — the emergency fund under the mattress, the coins in the jar, the bills in the wallet my husband carried until the day he died — and feed it into a machine that gave you a number on a screen. I stood in line for nine hours at the Federal Reserve satellite office in what was then still called Chicago. I handed a woman in a government uniform a shoebox containing $4,200 in bills and $380 in coins. She counted it, typed something into a terminal, and told me my wallet now contained Φ816.44 — the conversion rate that day. I asked her where my money went. She said it was in the system. I said no, where did my MONEY go — the bills, the coins, the paper with the presidents' faces. She pointed to a bin behind her desk, filled with cash. She said it would be destroyed. I asked if I could keep one bill, just one, as a memory. She said no.

I walked home that day with an empty shoebox and a number on a screen and the knowledge that something had been taken from me that I could not name. Not just the money — Φ816.44 was the correct amount, I was not cheated — but the thing the money represented. Autonomy. When I had cash, I could hand it to my neighbor and no one knew. I could give $20 to the man on the corner without creating a record. I could buy a birthday gift for my granddaughter without an algorithm predicting what I would buy and showing me ads for it. Cash was mine. I held it. I controlled it. I decided who saw it and who didn't. Quanta is not mine. It is a number in a system I do not own, managed by entities I did not choose, tracked by algorithms I cannot see, and worth whatever the people who control the system decide it is worth. It is money in the same way that a photograph of a meal is food. It represents the thing. It is not the thing.

My grandchildren think I am sentimental. They are right. But they are also wrong, because sentimentality implies that the thing being mourned is merely emotional, merely personal, merely an old woman's fondness for the textures of her childhood. What I am mourning is not texture. It is sovereignty. When you hold physical money, you hold power. Small power — the power to buy a sandwich, to pay a debt, to give a gift — but real power. Power that exists in your hand, not in a system. Power that requires no network, no verification, no permission. You reach into your pocket and the power is there. You hand it to someone and the power is theirs. No intermediary. No record. No algorithm watching and learning and predicting and controlling. Just two people and a piece of paper that both of them agree is worth something. That agreement — that human agreement, unmediated by technology — is what we lost. And my grandchildren will never know it existed, because they have never held money, and you cannot mourn what you have never known. I mourn it for them. I mourn it alone, because everyone who remembers is dying, and the young do not understand what they have been given in place of what was taken. They were given a number. We had money.