Sudden or Unexpected Deaths in Vermont

Coquin de Chien (John Paul Beaudoin, Sr.) has written a very informative and useful article about the occurrences of the words “suddenly” and “unexpectedly” in obituaries in the United States. Please read the article for the details and the alarming graphs, but the idea is that you can use Legacy.com’s obituary search engine to see how often these terms were used for particular date ranges and regions. The article shows graphs for the United States as a whole, and for several states individually. All of them show huge increases in the occurrence of “suddenly” and “unexpectedly” in obituaries in 2021. Of course, the very sciency scientific scientists are completely baffled about the cause, but it’s probably climate change or too many naps or something.

Here are the results for my home state of Vermont. As with all the other states, the trend is unmistakable. Note that the results for 2023 are just for the period up to today (Aug 28), so undoubtedly the total will be significantly larger by the end of the year.