New Jersey's obituaries skew younger than the nation by a full year

Drive the length of the Turnpike from Bergen County to Cape May and you pass through communities as different as any two states — dense immigrant neighborhoods where three generations share a duplex, quiet Shore towns where retirees walk the boardwalk year-round, former industrial corridors still bearing the scars of refinery closures. Death, too, moves differently across that landscape. Across 1,618 New Jersey obituaries with a recorded age, the mean age at death sits at 73.3 years — 1.2 years below the national figure and nearly five years short of the CDC's current life expectancy of 78. The median tells a kinder story at 79, but a standard deviation of 21.4 years reveals the tension beneath that number: a state where many people live well into their eighties while others die decades younger. That gap — wider than most readers would expect from one of the nation's wealthiest states — raises questions about which communities carry the burden and which barely feel it at all.