The last few years of her life, when I was managing all her accounts, I created an email account for my mother.

I was the only one who ever used it, of course, but it was useful for things like her Etrade account and such, rather than using my own account.

Well, it’s been more than five years since she died, and although I’ve informed Etrade of that fact and I’ve even sent them a formal letter that they could keep the one cent that was remaining in her account after it was closed, they still keep sending her quarterly notices of account statements.

For that and concerns that an idle account might be hacked, I decided that I should close her email account.

So I looked up gmail’s procedures for closing the account of a deceased relative and jumped through the hoops of sending them the death certificate and other things they needed.

Last night I received their reply:

We’re unable to close this account for one or more of the following reasons: 

• We could not verify the authenticity of the documents submitted
• We could not verify your association with the deceased person
• We could not verify the association of this Google account with the deceased person
• The account contains suspicious activity

Huh?

Well, whatever.

Then it dawned on me.

It was actually my account, even though I always thought of it as hers.

So I looked up the procedure for deleting a gmail account period.

It turned out to be much easier.

And I just did it.

Problem solved.