If you hate statistics, turn the page or click the mouse.
No, wait! That’s not a wise way for me to start a column.
Let’s try this: If you want to know how many more years you have left to live, keep reading.
Yeah, that’s better.
Now, I will admit that I can’t guarantee I’ll nail your precise “sell by” date. But we can come reasonably close, especially if you’re an average Joe or Jo living in Summit or Portage county.
The numbers come complements of Bob Daily, who owns a 112-year-old stone business, Daily Monuments in Kent. He mostly makes memorials for cemeteries.
When business slows to a crawl during the winter, as it inevitably does in his profession, he uses the extra time for special projects. This past winter he decided to do an in-depth study of deaths in the two counties.
Hey, some people read box scores, others are into death stats. Doesn’t seem like an unreasonable pastime for somebody in the monument business.
Using public records, Daily created a database containing people’s exact dates of birth and death, gender, method of disposition of the body and other fun-filled categories.
Although his database covers only one year — 2015 — there were plenty of numbers to crunch. Last year, 6,229 residents of Summit and 1,145 residents of Portage signed off.
I’ll save you the math: 7,374 people took their last breath last year.
That’s a lot of death.
Even some of Daily’s most basic tallies are interesting: Significantly more people were cremated last year — 54 percent —than were buried — 44 percent.
Nationwide, according to the National Funeral Directors Association, 2015 was the first year that cremations exceeded burials. The group says things have been moving in that direction mainly because religions that traditionally frowned on cremation, notably Catholicism, have loosened up.
Less than 2 percent of the local folks ended up in mausoleums, and a mere 0.8 percent donated their bodies for research.
Here’s another fun fact to know and tell: Only 68 people who died were 100 or older, an achievement that eluded 99.1 percent of the deceased. The oldest: 111 years and 66 days.
These were the most popular cemeteries for Summit and Portage countians:
• 294 burials at Greenlawn in Akron.
• 285 at Holy Cross in Akron.
• 249 at Ohio Western Reserve in Rittman.
• 222 at Hillside in Akron.
• 194 at Rose Hill in Akron.
Something else that caught my eye:
Twice as many married males died than divorced males, and three married females died for every two divorced females.
That seems contrary to conventional wisdom, but the numbers are totally misleading unless you check out (you’re welcome) the percentage of residents living in Summit and Portage who are married and divorced.
The latest census figures tell us this: 49 percent of the two-county population is married, while only 12 percent is divorced.
(About 33 percent have never married and about 6 percent are widowed.)
Daily said he didn’t have any stats on the life expectancy of married men who play a lot of golf compared to those who don’t. Which is probably just as well.
The stats are particularly illuminating when Daily combines multiple sets of numbers (stat people call that cross-tabulation). Exhibit A: the median life expectancy based on a person’s current age and gender.
(For those of you who flunked math, “median” means half the people are below the number in question and half are above. The “average” can be quite different.)
Daily crunched the numbers for every age from 25 to 102. I obviously don’t have room to run the whole list here, but here’s a small sample.
If you’re 25, you probably have 49 more years if you’re a male and 58 more years if you’re female.
At 45, males have 31 years left and females have 38.
By the age of 65, men have closed the gap considerably. They can expect to live to 82 compared to 85 for women.
The age at which you have the same number of years left as you’ve already lived: 37½ for men, 41½ for women.
(I will add a couple more stats that are unofficial because I’m just making them up. If you’re 25, there’s a 100 percent chance you are reading this online. If you’re 90, there’s a 100 percent chance you are holding the paper in your hands. But we digress.)
Will knowing these stats change anything?
Probably not — although you could view them as a gentle reminder that, in the words of Jim Morrison, no one here gets out alive, and if there are things you really want to do, you ought to do them sooner rather than later.
Bob Dyer can be reached at 330-996-3580 or bdyer@thebeaconjournal.com. He also is on Facebook at www.facebook.com/bob.dyer.31.