If you burn it, nothing happens.

If you bury it in a graveyard in Oakhaven, Ohio, nothing happens.

The money does not move.

The account does not close.

The bank’s record is the account, and the bank’s record is in a core system with thirty years of history behind it, and a blue cloth book with mud on the corner has approximately the legal significance of a till receipt from a supermarket.

Which means that on the fourteenth of October, when my father threw that book onto his mother’s coffin and told a graveside full of people it was nothing, he was correct.