After paying a student debt to Oglethorpe University, I had an emotional moment w/ Mom over money issues. We talked over how certain family members influenced my current feelings regarding one’s monetary worth. At some point, we talked about how Connie spent her last week of life sorting through her many credit cards in her deathbed.

And I cried.

I remember that period, the week before 11/12/13. It was grim to watch her go through her credit cards, her password book, her financials in a headlong, feeble rush to fulfill her last obligations. Her RN on one side of the bed, some CPA/paralegal-type on the other side, piles of paper and cards on her stomach, and her (now RJ’s) iPad on the siderail. I don’t want to sort through credit cards. I’ve never had or used credit cards, and I still don’t. I don’t see the point. I don’t want to end up like Connie, with credit cards trailing me for the rest of my life.

But are credit cards and credit scores the bane of the millennial experience? Are they as much the currency for our relative material fortune as they were for Connie from the 90s to 2013? Was it the military service which helped pay the credit cards, or did she get the credit cards because the military service didn’t pay enough for the make-up-for-lost-time gifts she bought the nephews after coming back from Iraq in 2005? I don’t really understand it. I don’t know why she had so many credit cards. But I don’t want them.