As with most of the people who end up on his table, he was familiar with Maxwell and the troubled life she had led. “She looks a lot older than that,” the assistant said. “She looks older,” said Ridener, who did the same. “She doesn’t look 44,” an assistant said, snapping on blue latex gloves. Across America, especially in rural and working-class communities, death rates have been accelerating among middle-aged white women for a generation, and in McCreary County, which is 91 percent white, no one knows this better than the undertaker, who now lifted Maxwell’s body onto an aluminum table. The document didn’t say anything about a cause of death, but Ridener didn’t need it to know what had happened: Another white woman had died in what should have been the prime of her life. A provisional report of death came with the body. Then he removed the blanket covering McCreary County Funeral Home’s newest arrival.Ĭurly, blond hair. The undertaker watched as the Cadillac Escalade pulled up and the corpse was wheeled inside. She died alone in the middle of the night, and her body was swiftly autopsied, embalmed and carted 135 miles to a remote Kentucky county where she had been raised. Read part one, part two, part three and part four. The Washington Post is exploring this trend and the forces driving it. UNNATURAL CAUSES SICK AND DYING IN SMALL-TOWN AMERICA | Since the turn of this century, death rates have risen for whites in midlife, particularly women. Over the last 15 years, the state’s McCreary County has seen a 75 percent increase in the mortality rate for white women between the ages of 35 and 59, one of the highest increases in the nation, according to a Washington Post analysis of national mortality rates. Pallbearers unload a coffin at Smith Cemetery in Strunk, Ky.
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