Facing My Demons on Mulholland Drive

After more than two years on Zoom, our yoga group planned a party — in person. Our fabulous yoga instructor, Mollie, volunteered Shira’s home in the Hollywood Hills, for its magnificent location. Shira has a wide flagstone patio with a stunning view that overlooks the city. Yoga at sunset, wine, music, and gourmet edibles. It sounded heavenly. 

As women enthusiastically RSVP’d to our WhatsApp group, I stayed quiet. Shira’s house is on a little street off Mulholland Drive, the fabled, scenic road that follows the ridgeline of the eastern Santa Monica Mountains. In its most dangerous loop, it twists and turns like a snake. Long before David Lynch’s 2001 thriller “Mulholland Drive,” which begins with a scene of a fiery head-on collision on this road, I already associated Mulholland with peril and sorrow. Shira knew why. Some months earlier at a dinner party, she had invited me to come visit her.  “You’ll love the view,” she promised.

She was taken aback when I apologized, saying that I would probably never visit her home. When I was nine years old, I told her, I came home one Thursday at dusk after Hebrew School and saw my mother waiting for me on our front lawn, her head slightly bowed. My heart lurched. My mother never waited for me outside. Something was terribly wrong.

I ran to her. Through her tears, she said, “There’s been a very bad accident, and Allan is dead.” In shock, I held my mother tightly as we both cried. My seventeen-year-old brother, whom I had seen sleeping in his bed that morning, was gone. He had driven along Mulholland that day to visit our grandparents — it had been our grandmother’s birthday. But he drove off that cliff. 

Oddly, I have driven L.A.’s canyon roads hundreds of times with no problem. I’m even okay on the road up to Big Bear, but I prefer to drive. Admittedly, I can be an excruciating passenger but am considered a good driver, except by one of my adult children, who is incorrect. But each time I arrive at the crest of Coldwater or Laurel Canyon and see the Mulholland street sign, my stomach grips and I look away.  

When Mollie learned my reason for not attending, she gently encouraged me to come. A wonderful friend as well as my yoga instructor, she offered to drive through the clotted freeways to minimize our time on the canyon road. She volunteered her husband to calm me through hypnotherapy before the drive. I was a stalwart yogini in the group and I would be missed, she said. I looked up Shira’s address on Google maps, and I realized we would hardly be on Mulholland at all before turning onto her street. 

Since Allan’s death, I have only been on Mulholland once — many years ago, unintentionally and as a passenger. That’s when I had the only panic attack of my life. Now, I decided it was time to face my fears. I would sit in Mollie’s car and let her make that left turn onto Mulholland Drive. Twinges of anxiety plagued me throughout the day, but I was calm when Mollie pulled up and I climbed into the back seat with Steinway, her lovable, Australian Shepherd, a sixty-three-pound blanket of love. Steinway must have guessed my intention to use him as a therapy dog because as soon as I sat down, he pinned me against the passenger door and licked my face mercilessly until Mollie commanded him to stop.  

Shira had not exaggerated. The view was spectacular as we did yoga in the cool of the evening, city lights twinkling far below. It felt surreal to be there, and I had trouble keeping my balance during our first moves. But I recovered. After our practice, I drank heavily, which means I had a small cup of white wine, whose lubricating effects I felt immediately. Glass in hand, I confided to two friends why the evening was significant for me. They hugged me, as good friends do.

In one sense, I hadn’t traveled far — just a few hundred feet on the road that was my nemesis. But emotionally, I had crossed a vast expanse. Thanks to the loving encouragement of my husband and friends, I was able to go the distance.

Judy Gruen’s latest book is “The Skeptic and the Rabbi: Falling in Love with Faith.”