Here Comes The Baby Boomer Death Wave

In the late 1940s to 1950s, there was a large increase in the birthrate in the United States from the huge wave of people starting families after World War 2. The average person lives to be about 78-79 years old so that means the corresponding wave of deaths is starting to take shape. Indeed, having spoken recently with people who work in the mortuary industry, they are seeing a flood of demand for their services.

Having recently dealt with the loss of my father, I have some experience I can share. I know this outside of the wheelhouse of what I normally write, but I wrote the tutorials to pass on knowledge I wish I had and I figure somebody might get a bit of use out of this information I wish I had 15 or so years ago.

Death is a process, not an event

Death is not merely the second when a person’s heart/lungs stop working. Unless someone dies in a sudden accident, death/aging is a process. At first, they don’t move like they used to and before you know it, they’re in a wheelchair and you’re hauling them to the emergency room. Don’t look at the 79-year life expectancy and think they’re going to be 100% fine and then they’ll suddenly drop dead on their 79th birthday. People’s health degrades over a natural aging process so don’t think you can do everything in the 78th year that you can do in the 60th or even 75th year.

90% of people think they drive better than average, and you probably think your loved ones are the exception to statistics

The way normal distributions work is that if the average height is 5’8” for men, that means half of all men are taller and half of all men are shorter. This is why it is unlikely that 90% of people who think they better than average actually are.

If life expectancy is 79 years, that means there’s only a 50% chance your loved one will make it to that age. And, no, don’t think because your grandparents lived to 83 or 88 years that your parents will be the exception. My dad learned that the hard way.

A person’s health does not neatly and slowly degrade over time

After the pandemic lockdowns started going away I made an effort to take my parents out more after losing family to COVID. After helping put photos together for the funeral slideshow, I forgot how recently my dad was fully mobile and it was only fairly recently that he needed a wheelchair. I have heard stories of people who were fully independent and then in a matter of months be unable to take care of themselves.

Not only can a person’s health degrade at an accelerated pace, it can also bounce up an down. One day they can give you a nasty health scare, the next month they’ll be better than they’ve been in years. It can bounce up and down until one day you take them to the hospital and they don’t come back home.

Modern medicine can give you a false sense of confidence

Because a person’s health can bob up and down, you might get into the habit of taking your parent to the emergency room, have them stay for a few days or weeks if they’re having a procedure, and then take them home with maybe a new medication or having them use a walker. You’ll get into the habit of seeing their health degrade and the doctor getting them to at least workable state.

After this happens 2 or 3 times, you may react with the next time you take parent to the emergency room with “Welp, you didn’t obey doctor’s order so here we go again dad”. You take them to the doctor fairly confident that they’ll patch them up again and you’ll be able to take that family trip to the zoo because you seen them bounce back from worse shape before. Only this time, your parent will not be so lucky. Doctors can do a lot to save a patient, but don’t think that you’ll know when that last trip to the doctor is because it will seem like just another trip until it isn’t.

Know your parents medical history and how any conditions they have can progress

Hospitals are understaffed and if your loved one is not about to die within the next hour, they’re going to put them on the backburner. This means that your loved one could require attention but because it’s not immediate life or death, they are not going to investigate things until it’s too late.

If your loved one has a condition that can progress like kidney issues, make sure to mention it to the doctor so they can check if it progressed. Don’t assume something is monocausal (can be caused by only one thing). Your parent could have a history of GERD and you can write off their stomach pain as more acid reflux only to take them to the hospital to find out this time stomach cancer is causing the pain.

You should create a bucket list for your older loved ones

Fortunately I did make more of an effort to spend time with parents after losing family to COVID. Unfortunately, I did not make more a strategic effort to maximize the time I had. Twice a year on birthdays and Father’s/Mother’s day is not enough. Come up with a list what you want to do and prioritize. Also if there’s any information you might lose with your parent (recipes, family history, etc), try to get it before it’s too late.

Here’s a table of age vs probability of death (With mean = 79 and standard deviation = 15):

Age	Probability of Being Dead
50	2.66%
51	3.10%
52	3.59%
53	4.15%
54	4.78%
55	5.48%
56	6.26%
57	7.12%
58	8.08%
59	9.12%
60	10.26%
61	11.51%
62	12.85%
63	14.31%
64	15.87%
65	17.53%
66	19.31%
67	21.19%
68	23.17%
69	25.25%
70	27.43%
71	29.69%
72	32.04%
73	34.46%
74	36.94%
75	39.49%
76	42.07%
77	44.70%
78	47.34%
79	50.00%
80	52.66%
81	55.30%
82	57.93%
83	60.51%
84	63.06%
85	65.54%
86	67.96%
87	70.31%
88	72.57%
89	74.75%
90	76.83%
91	78.81%
92	80.69%
93	82.47%
94	84.13%
95	85.69%
96	87.15%
97	88.49%
98	89.74%
99	90.88%
100	91.92%
101	92.88%
102	93.74%
103	94.52%
104	95.22%
105	95.85%

Keep and mind that a) this is using normal distribution to approximate probability and these probabilities do not match up exactly with actual death probability and b) you may be thinking “Oh at 61 they only have less than a 12% probability” but remember that 12.5% probability is also the odds of getting 3 heads in a row when doing coin flips. If I told you I was going to flip a coin 3 times and if they came up all heads your parent was going to die, you’d probably sweating even if the odds are still in your favor.

Take videos as well as photos of your loved ones

Along with taking my parents out more I started taking more pictures, but also make sure to take videos even if they’re short ones because you will miss their voices. They don’t have to give speeches but just taking short clips of asking them where they are on vacation will be something you wished you took.

Have a plan to access their digital assets

I set up my dad’s digital everything so I knew where to get his passwords. Having looked online, not being able to access email accounts can cause a lot of headaches.


However, no matter how much you prepare, how much you take care of them, or if you manage to perfectly optimize your time with them, their time will come. When that time comes:

Yep, the mortuary industry will try to suck as much money out of you as possible

They tried to charge hundreds of dollars to bury him within an hour of bringing him to the cemetery. We just waited until end of day to have him buried. If my dad was alive, he would have told them to F off and he could wait. They are going to try to take advantage of you, be careful.

Funerals are very expensive, pre-purchase what you can

Had my mom not prepurchased a package and burial plot, it would have set my family back over $40,000. We paid roughly half that so preordering stuff is not a trivial in terms of savings. It’s not like we got a gold-plated casket, it was a fairly basic wake, church service, burial service, and reception.

Expect the time of death to end of funeral to be 7-14 days

It can take 4 or so days just to get burial permits. There also various other miscellaneous paperwork that takes time. Combine that with higher the increasing amount of people needing burials, things to take a week minimum, most likely more.

Bereavement leave policies are a joke

Between the in my opinion fairly basic wake+funeral+burial+reception we had, it took my family a combined minimum of 400 man hours to prepare. I have had some family members only get 3 days of bereavement leave, but it can easily eat two work weeks of leave if you are involved in planning and hosting funeral services.

Having to deal with a close family member’s death is like a bunch of holes opened up on the ground

Everybody reacts differently, but if I were to describe the experience is that there is an initial impact, then a period of shock, then you’re distracted by everything that needs to get done for the funeral arrangements. Then comes the part when you have to continue on with your life.

Now that you have to navigate life with a large part of it gone and there’s more pieces that are missing than you initially realized. Everything just starts to feel wrong somehow. A quite afternoon at your childhood home now feels like a deafening silence from the lack of YouTube videos your dad used to watch from the TV. The first wave is bad from the initial impact (and the loss of appetite and insomnia that comes with it) but the second wave from trying to rebuild your life probably hits harder.

Watch out for your parents mental health

One thing that struck me at the cemetery is how many couples were buried together with years of death very close together. Dying from a broken heart is very much a thing.

If you have work-a-holic parents like mine, encourage them to join local senior centers to build their social circle because the lack of a strong social circle is statistically as bad for your health as chain smoking.

Considering live streaming services for family

My parents grew up poor and a lot of their family couldn’t afford a plane ticket to attend services, but they could go to a family member who had high speed internet. Hosting a zoom where they could watch services and chat with family was really helpful for them.

I do recommend hosting a test event next time you have a birthday or thanksgiving. There’s tons of little things that can go wrong like speakers not working right.

I am not an expert in mortuary services or a therapist. Please consult professionals instead of just emailing me for answers

In case this goes viral, I am not really in a position to answer a bunch of emails right now for this stuff (even if they’re thank you emails). I am not an expert on any of these things, but I have experience that I can share that might help people. This is was not meant to be some sort of authoritative guide, just some tips that will hopefully get people to start researching things from expert sources so they can better prepare.

One thing I did not have to worry about were assets because my dad had negative net worth when he passed (make sure not to let your medical insurance lapse, kids). If he did have assets I don’t want to know what additional headaches that would have caused.

I just wanted to create this page with some basic tips so hopefully someone can learn from my experience and make the most of their time with their loved ones and help manage things when they’re gone.