The Choice That Didn’t End My Career – It Saved It

Forty years ago, in the early years of my career as a funeral director – and after doing a little modeling on the side to make extra money — I accepted an offer to pose for Playboy. I was told my career would be over.

The pronouncements weren’t quiet or subtle. They were direct. Colleagues and friends alike predicted that my life in funeral service would come to a screeching halt. A woman who worked with the dead, who helped grieving families, and who stood at the crossroads of ritual and respect, was not expected to do something so bold, so visible, so unapologetically alive.

But predictions often say more about the person making them than about the person they’re aimed at. My career didn’t end. It began.

A Moment That Set Me Apart

When the issue came out, I braced myself for backlash. Instead, something unexpected happened: people were curious, not scandalized. Seeing a funeral director in Playboy made them take notice. It set me apart in a field that can be cloaked in sameness and silence.

That curiosity opened doors. Conversations turned into opportunities. Those opportunities turned into assignments, and those assignments grew into a writing career that has now spanned hundreds of published articles on funeral service, cemetery history, and the meaningful ways we honor the dead.

At the time, I didn’t realize it, but the photo shoot started everything.

A Respite from Death

What most people never understood – and what I didn’t fully grasp until years later – was that the photo shoot happened at a time when I was wrestling with my future. Funeral service is meaningful work, but it is also emotionally – and physically – difficult. It asks you to carry other people’s grief while managing your own. It requires steadiness, compassion, and a kind of emotional stamina that can quietly erode over time.

Years later, in my memoir, Grave Undertakings, I dealt with those emotions, writing: “I felt increasingly depressed and restless. I seemed to be going nowhere.” Adding: “Ephemeral as it was, my association with Playboy was something I was doing purely for my pleasure. It was also the respite I needed to return to my chosen career with renewed vigor.”

I wasn’t tired of the families I served. I was tired of the weight I carried.

A Moment Inside the Photo Shoot

I remember standing under the studio lights, surprised by how calm I felt. For the first time in months, I wasn’t carrying anyone’s grief. I wasn’t arranging a funeral or guiding a family through loss. I was simply myself – unburdened, unhurried, and unexpectedly at ease in my own skin. Unlike that first day on the set, when I’d arrived tense and tight, stressed by the pent‑up angst of work, this moment felt different. At one point, the photographer lowered his camera and said, “You look like you’re breathing easily again.” He was right. I was.

Posing for Playboy wasn’t rebellion. It was relief. A breath of fresh air. It gave me a moment to step outside the grief‑laden world I lived in every day and remember I was still a whole person, not just a profession. Had I not taken that opportunity, burnout might have swallowed me whole.

Now, with the clarity that only maturity provides, I can see how necessary that moment was – not because it was daring, but because it reminded me that I was allowed to evolve. Back then, I didn’t know how fleeting confidence could feel, or how powerful it is to reclaim it decades later. Sometimes the choices we make when we’re young are the very ones that carry us forward.

The photo shoot became a respite, and a reminder that I was more than my job. Instead of ending my career, the experience set me apart and ultimately jumpstarted my writing life. Now that I’m in my 60s, I can see the choice clearly: it didn’t define me, but it redirected me. It gave me the space and distance I needed to keep going.

The Choice That Aged Well

Now that I’m older, I can say this without hesitation: I’m glad I did it. Not because it was glamorous. Not because it was daring – though it certainly was. But because it was mine. A choice I made for myself at a time when I needed something different, something light, something that reminded me I was more than my work.

And yet, it does not define my life.

It isn’t the main story of my life. It is a chapter. A vivid one, yes, but just a chapter. The real story is what came after: the writing, the research, the cemeteries, the families, the decades spent building a career rooted in service, history, and meaning.

The photo shoot didn’t overshadow my life. It expanded it.

And here’s something older age has taught me: the warnings that felt loud in my 20s feel irrelevant now. Age has a way of quieting the voices that once tried to define us. Reinvention isn’t a phase of youth – it’s a lifelong skill. And later in life is often when we finally become brave enough to use it.

The Publicity Tour

On the publicity tour I met people who expected a caricature of a nude model with nothing to say beyond the page. Instead, they met a funeral director who could talk about ritual, grief, and the meaning of remembrance. The contrast fascinated them. In a way, it surprised me too.

During a guest appearance on one of the popular daytime talk shows that dominated the 1980s, the host asked why a funeral director would pose for Playboy. I didn’t hesitate: “Because I needed to remember I was alive.” The phone lines lit up. Women called in to say they understood – that they, too, had made choices others didn’t understand, choices that helped them reclaim some part of themselves.

Their support surprised me – not because they agreed with the decision, but because they saw the truth inside it. The choice to pose for Playboy wouldn’t be for everyone, but it worked for me.

Those conversations stayed with me. They were the first hint that my story wasn’t just mine. It belonged to every woman who had ever stepped outside expectation long enough to find herself again.

For Every Woman Who Has Ever Wondered If Her Bold Choices Were Mistakes

If there’s a message in my story, it’s this: the unconventional choices we make in our 20s and 30s often look different through the lens of midlife and beyond. What once felt risky can reveal itself as necessary. What others labeled a detour can turn out to be a turning point.

You may have your own version of that choice – a moment you feared would unravel your life but ended up stitching you back together.

Sometimes the thing people warn you not to do becomes the thing that saves you. Sometimes the moment you think might derail your life becomes the moment that redirects it. And sometimes in a wonderful and unexpected way, the choice that others misunderstand becomes the one that helps you become more fully yourself.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

Have you made a pivotal choice that redirected your life? Was it a choice that no one understood at the time? What did that choice give you back?