A Month to Die For
Are There Seasons for Death?
[Published August 5, 2010]
In making causal conversation with an acquaintance at a recent wedding, he told me he worked for a funeral home, assisting the funeral director various ways. I wondered if there were seasons to the funeral business, so I asked. I was a bit surprised at his answer. His experience was there were more deaths with the changing of the seasons, that is to say more funerals in the spring and fall. The implication he was making was that the seasonal change triggered people who where fighting death to relax and allow death to occur. This conversation got me wondering if this was the case for the history of deaths in the Greater Ducklow family. So I checked.
Left: Charles Ducklow Family Plot Maker in Woodlawn Cemetery, Sparta, Monroe County, Wisconsin
Of 236 known death dates of descendants and their spouses from the year 1850 to year 2010, the month with highest count was January with 28. November had the fewest with 13. Only one month was right on the average—that was May with 20. The data also does not indicate a “cycle,” climbing and falling in a predictable manner, but rather is variable from month to month. Frankly, I’m not sure what this means other than to say it appears to be random, and the month with the fewest days has fewer deaths—February.
At least according to one one-line source, January is month with the highest number of deaths in America. The same source claims September be the month with the fewest deaths. So perhaps in my acquaintances direct experience the higher numbers occur in the spring and fall, but for our family history it’s the dead of winter—in January (pun intended).
Table
Deaths by Month
January 28
February 16
March 23
April 16
May 20
June 24
July 24
Aug 18
September 16
October 24
November 13
December 14
Total 236
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Footnote1 : Source is: http://www.webanswers.com/health/months-as-ranked-highest-to-lowest-death-rate-u-s-66e524
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