Continuing with our data series, the number of deaths each year brings the percentages into a clearer picture.

You can see that for a long stretch of time, even while the U.S. population continued to increase (by how much? Hint: a lot—stay tuned for another chart), the number of people dying each year remained relatively static. Yes, the number of annual deaths increased, but very slowly.

As a side note: the reason I’m beginning this graph in 1933 is because we don’t know the actual death numbers from before that year. It took some time for the entire U.S. to buy into the need to keep such records. As early as the 1880s a few places like Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. kept official death records, but it was a slow process to expand the “death registration area” to encompass all of the nation.

If you look at the beginning on the left and follow the line across, you can see it took almost 70 years, from 1933 to 1999, for the mortality number to increase by a million, and for 10 years after that it barely increased at all. Population growth during the period made that line seem even flatter in terms of number of funerals per capita.

While population increased, and technology made work easier, people died from a lot fewer things, and life in general got better than it had been for the entirety of recorded history, there seemed to be less death occurring around most of us, including around funeral businesses. The latter were not unaffected by this ongoing state of affairs.

Here is a graph of the mortality figures in the United States from 1933 onward, and below it are the data by year.