Hollywood Forever: Toward a Fuller Self

Hollywood Forever Cemetery sits on Santa Monica Boulevard, just down the street from Paramount Studios. From the outside, surrounded by auto shops and strip malls, it’s easy to miss. Step through the gates, though, and the world changes. Peacocks wander across green lawns like storybook creatures. A vintage hearse greets you at the entrance. The grounds feel theatrical, even playful—a garden of Eden in the middle of Los Angeles.

The cemetery’s name says it all: Hollywood Forever, paired with an infinity logo that winks at our wish for immortality. It’s campy, but also strangely comforting. This isn’t a dreary place of exile. Here the dead have never really left us—they live on our screens, conjured at will. In summer, thousands gather to watch films projected against a mausoleum wall, picnic blankets spread where just six feet below legends lie in the dark. I remember seeing Blade Runner there in 2019. When the words “Los Angeles, November 2019” appeared onscreen, the crowd burst into applause. For a moment, fantasy and reality, life and death, all overlapped.

We can think of our inner world in the same way. Each of us carries ghosts—memories, losses, old images of ourselves that persist. Often we try to push them away, and in doing so they return in haunting ways. But we don’t have to banish them. Like Hollywood Forever, we can keep them nearby without letting them rule our lives. Therapy helps with this work. It gives us a safe space to recognize ghosts and to learn how to engage with them, so their presence becomes part of living rather than a force that undoes us.

The playful, campy side of Hollywood Forever is important too. It doesn’t only soften dread—it turns it into something vital. Peacocks strut across graves, tours are given in vintage costumes, the infinity logo exaggerates what it can’t deliver. The message is clear: death is real, but we can still laugh, gather, and celebrate. We do this in our own lives as well. Humor, ritual, and creativity can transform fear into something livable.

And just as the cemetery sits apart from the noise of Santa Monica Boulevard, we too can create spaces where the past can be approached on our own terms. It doesn’t have to erupt into daily life unchecked. We can choose when to engage it—in therapy, in remembrance, or in quiet reflection.

Hollywood Forever shows that the past doesn’t have to weigh us down. It can remain close, acknowledged and even honored, while we stay rooted in the scene unfolding now. What has come before doesn’t vanish, but when integrated it can deepen rather than diminish our ability to be alive in the present.