Tea with Granny

In this episode, I have tea with one of my many grandmothers, and we talk about love, death and the Kennedys! 
This episode marks the end of season 1... Thank you for listening and see you in August! 

Get notified when the Silken Mirror membership opens in 2023 : http://eepurl.com/dxzCk9

Follow us on Instagram @moonlitpathchannel

This podcast is hosted by Laure Porché: http://laureporche.com. You can follow me on Instagram @laureporche
If you're enjoying the podcast, consider sharing it or leaving a review on Apple Podcast :)

Transcript

[00:00:00] 

[00:00:00] Laure: Welcome to the last episode of season one. After this episode, I will take, a two months hiatus and start season two in August. This episode is a little late because I really wanted to introduce you to one of my favorite persons in the world, one of the many grandmothers that I was talking about in the last episode, and it took longer than I anticipated to make that happen. This conversation is a little less structured than what you're used to and some context might be absent, but I hope you will enjoy it nonetheless. 

[00:00:42] I'm going to set this up and it should be fine. Can you talk a little bit just so that I can hear, can you talk a bit so I can hear your voice? Yes. 

[00:00:57] Here we are, we are both alive. Yay. 

[00:01:02] Elena: And it's a beautiful day. 

[00:01:03] Laure: It's a beautiful day. 

[00:01:05] So the first question I ask people, and you may take all the time you want to answer that because usually, I send it in advance, is what is one of your favorite stories and how did it help you in your life? And I know that might be hard and that can be any story. It can be like somebody else's story, or it can be a book in movie. 

[00:01:26] Elena: No, my, that story that I'm telling you is a very... If you look up there's a crack in, in the ceiling. Yeah. Years and years ago, we were in America. Yeah. As we left the house, we rented it, Raymond took the gentleman upstairs and said, be very careful because there's no floor there's just beams, beams.

[00:01:56] Yeah. So don't fall in between. Yeah. So we spent the years in America, fascinating time. We arrived just after his inauguration and just before his assassination, Kennedy. And as you know, he's a friend... 

[00:02:15] Laure: He's a friend of? 

[00:02:17] Elena: Me. I went to their first dinner party.

[00:02:19] Laure: I didn't know. Oh, you have to tell me this story. 

[00:02:22] Elena: I used to go out with Teddy.

[00:02:25] Laure: Oh, wow. 

[00:02:26] Elena: And learned how to read with all of them. Bobby, Teddy, and Jack. 

[00:02:31] Laure: I had no idea.

[00:02:32] Elena: And used to irritate them by reading quicker than they did. I have many stories about him. 

[00:02:42] Laure: Oh my God. 

[00:02:43] Elena: Yeah. Very many stories.

[00:02:46] Laure: I'm glad that I'm getting to learn new things about you everyday.

[00:02:50] Elena: And Jackie and the stories with her parents in law, and certainly the most, unattractive man that I've ever met was Joe Kennedy, father. 

[00:03:05] Laure: Yeah. I'm not surprised. So you were in America for three years. 

[00:03:10] Elena: For three years, we rented the house out. Raymond said, be very careful. So I unpack and he comes in and says, can I take it upstairs? I said of course, then I was lying on the bed, suddenly I see his leg appear, jusqu'au genou!

[00:03:32] "Where do you want your suitcase darling?"

[00:03:42] It was a fantastic moment! 

[00:03:43] Laure: I'm sure. 

[00:03:44] Elena: And the other day, when I was feeling pretty low, it started cracking. 

[00:03:50] Laure: Oh, that's wonderful. 

[00:03:52] Elena: So I said you're here, you're telling me you are here. Yeah. 

[00:03:56] Laure: Okay. "Where do you want your suitcase, darling?" 

[00:04:03] Elena: Yeah. 

[00:04:03] Laure: It's a good story.

[00:04:04] It's a good story. 

[00:04:05] Elena: And then that was so touching that it happened that the day when I was obviously not feeling well, yeah. Must have wondered "how the hell do I tell her that I'm here?".

[00:04:19] Laure: That's a good one. Yeah. It is a very good story. I can't imagine having as many stories as you have because you have all your stories, which are pretty, there's a lot of amazing stuff in there as we just saw, cause I had no idea that you knew the Kennedys. But also you have all your client's stories that came on top of that. 

[00:04:40] Elena: Stories, I love stories, comme toi.

[00:04:43] Laure: Yeah. When you were working because you were a therapist, did you use story with your clients or not at all? 

[00:04:50] Elena: No. I was silent. 

[00:04:52] Laure: Oh, you were like a silent therapist.

[00:04:55] Elena: Silent unless they needed just one word. 

[00:04:59] Laure: Oh God. Was it easy?

[00:05:01] Elena: I did. I did a very silly thing. I saw someone called Estrella for quite a long time. For very, very little money. And because, it's an awful thing to say, she was so mad, it was brilliant for me. So she'd arrive, she said, my head is yet today, but not my heart.

[00:05:24] Or then she said my heart, but not my head. And then I can't sit on anything, I have to lie down. And she taught me a lot. 

[00:05:32] Laure: I'm sure! 

[00:05:34] Elena: We had an hour and a half sessions.

[00:05:39] Laure: Of you not talking?

[00:05:40] Elena: And she sometimes not talking a word. Wow. Not a word, but that's when I really started learning. 

[00:05:50] Laure: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I can't imagine. I'm a very interfering therapist. I talk a lot. I tell people what I see and I give them a lot of information and I educate them around their own self. 

[00:06:04] Elena: That's fantastic. 

[00:06:05] Laure: I don't know if it's fantastic. It's easy for me. 

[00:06:10] Elena: We have to work that way, but I worked for years that way until I realized that it was fine, but I had to change. 

[00:06:20] Laure: Yeah. you worked for years in silence then you changed to intervening. 

[00:06:25] Elena: Yeah. Yeah. That's because I went to see Klaube (sp?)

[00:06:29] Laure: Who is that ?

[00:06:30] Elena: Klaube was the head of the European Freudian association, never opened his mouth.

[00:06:39] Laure: And that was not helpful for you? 

[00:06:42] Elena: Yes, it was because I spent three years lying on a couch in silence. 

[00:06:48] Laure: Wow. 

[00:06:49] Elena: Which is exactly what had happened to me. And then a horrible thing happened. I was lying there and I was telling him that Raymond had just been given the diagnosis of a brain tumor. He spoke, 

[00:07:11] Laure: Oh no! 

[00:07:13] Elena: He lost it. His brother had died of the same thing. Just escaped him. 

[00:07:21] Laure: And that was terrible for you, that he spoke? 

[00:07:23] Elena: Was the end of the analysis for me, but those years of total silence where invaluable for me, I mean it repeated my childhood. 

[00:07:36] Yeah. I guess. 

[00:07:38] I needed it to accept that I felt comfortable, but every time I left I would go to Louise Patisserie in Hampstead and buy a mille feuille, if that doesn't say enough.

[00:07:53] Laure: Yeah, you were resolving something in the silence. Yeah. 

[00:07:56] Elena: The whole point was that my father had said that I had caused the depression in mother. 

[00:08:02] Laure: Oh God. 

[00:08:03] Elena: That's why they didn't never have the third child. Okay. So I had this feeling of terrible guilt. Also for the first three years of my life I didn't see her. Yeah. She was in and out of different places. She never gave me a bottler. Yeah. I don't think she maybe never held me. Because when I handed her Edward, she said, I don't know how to hold a baby. It was very very touching.

[00:08:35] And it goes, that makes me feel very, very sad. Yeah.

[00:08:39] Laure: Well, it is very sad. Yeah. 

[00:08:43] Elena: No, no, but it's good. 

[00:08:44] Laure: It's good? 

[00:08:45] Elena: It's wonderful. 

[00:08:46] Laure: Okay. 

[00:08:48] Elena: Regarde l'âge que j'ai (look at my age). Isn't it wonderful? 

[00:08:52] Laure: Isn't it wonderful. 

[00:08:54] Elena: Yeah. C'est très émouvant (it's very moving). I think it's yeah, 

[00:08:57] Laure: I think it's forever, you know? 

[00:08:59] Elena: Of course! Age is of no consequence. 

[00:09:03] Laure: Yeah. Age or working on yourself. Cause after my 25 years of therapy. And I'm starting to realize that some things, they're not going to go away. 

[00:09:12] Elena: Of course they're not!

[00:09:13] Laure: Yeah. But you would think I would have realized that earlier, but I didn't.

[00:09:17] Elena: No, but then I took a hell of a long time to realize that we've got worlds to process. Yeah. Why do we think that our internal world is this size? 

[00:09:32] Laure: I don't know. That's pretty small... 

[00:09:33] Elena: Why don't we think that it is, it has five continents. 

[00:09:38] Laure: Yeah. And more.

[00:09:39] Elena: The world and lakes and mountains and time. 

[00:09:44] Laure: Yeah. What you're saying just reminds me of my dream last night of seeing this incredible expense that I had to cross before I could get home. So for some reason just reminds me of that. Yeah, yeah.

[00:09:59] Elena: Yeah. Well it is a long journey. 

[00:10:02] Laure: It is a long journey. I wonder, people always ask old people is there anything that you regret in your life, but I kind of want to ask the opposite, which is what is something or some things that you did, that you weren't sure at the time, but you really, really happy that you did them or you really don't regret that ? The things that you're the happiest that you did, or that you lived, that you're the most, you know.

[00:10:25] Elena: That's a hell of a lot of moments. 

[00:10:28] Laure: I know, but pick a few.

[00:10:32] Elena: Seeing my nanny die. 

[00:10:34] Laure: Yeah.

[00:10:35] Elena: Certainly top. 

[00:10:37] Laure: Well, that's something that might not have been easy in the moment, but that...

[00:10:43] Elena: It was because she didn't lose her teeth.

[00:10:45] Laure: You were afraid she was going to lose her teeth. 

[00:10:48] Elena: I knew, I absolutely knew that her head came down and the teeth fell out and she died, she would have minded terribly. Whereas, holding this little broken doll and asking God to please, please don't let her die without her teeth. And her head went back and she died and the teeth went in. That was the most extraordinary moment in my life. 

[00:11:23] Laure: Wow. And you were 12. 

[00:11:24] Elena: 12, holding this little Dolly, which Phillip had broken. 

[00:11:29] Laure: Oh, your brother. 

[00:11:31] Elena: Yeah. By mistake, it wasn't done because he was mischievous and she, nanny, because she was quite old, had put the piece back, there was still a hole there, but she put the forehead back very badly and the forehead, it wasn't flat, but I felt, I couldn't tell her that she'd done it badly.

[00:11:54] Laure: You were already quite sensitive. 

[00:11:58] Elena: Awfully sensitive. 

[00:11:59] Laure: Cause even thinking, oh, she would hate to die with her teeth out at 12 years old. That's, you know, that is so kind of you at that age. 

[00:12:10] Elena: I've never thought of that. 

[00:12:12] Laure: That you were so attuned. And I know you were so attuned to everybody, cause everybody was asking you to be a different person when you were a child.

[00:12:22] Elena: I had a different name for all of them. That's very curious. 

[00:12:28] Laure: This is very curious and I'm sure it made you a great therapist.

[00:12:32] Elena: It's an interesting thought. 

[00:12:35] Laure: And what are the names like? What were you named? 

[00:12:38] Elena: Pécore, Fripouille, Bobonne, Marraine. 

[00:12:44] Laure: Oh God. They're all terrible French names or let's just say they're very specific in the role that you're having to play. Yeah. Wow. You were so lovely as a child, you know, when I was going through my grandmothers pictures there's a couple of you with your big bow on your head and you look for, look like a doll. Yeah. You look like a doll. Yeah. So, so gorgeous. 

[00:13:12] Elena: I was ultra sensitive. And then whenever I had any money given to me, I would go and buy them presents. 

[00:13:22] Laure: That hasn't changed at all! 

[00:13:24] Elena: Which irritated them to no end, but for me, I used to come and stay Auntie Lily, Auntie Poppy, who stayed in Tunbridge Wells. Tunbridge Wells at that time was full of antique shops. I'd be given some money. And all I did was to go and buy little things for uncle Max, auntie Lily, Auntie Poppy, David, Philip, the lot.

[00:13:50] Laure: Yeah. Well, that hasn't changed a lot. 

[00:13:54] Elena: No, I was thinking the other day, what it's given me the most pleasure in life? Giving presents. 

[00:14:01] Laure: Well, you and my grandmother were quite the present givers. She would give presents to people on her birthday.

[00:14:07] Elena: No, I love that. 

[00:14:09] Laure: At the end of her birthday, you know, whoever the cook was would show up with a huge basket full of presents for everybody but her. 

[00:14:19] Elena: Yeah, that's lovely. 

[00:14:21] Laure: Lovely and a little neurotic. When we went through her flat. There was like a whole cupboard full of presents, anticipated presents, you know, stuff that she would buy in order to have something , if she needed to give some, to someone like your room, you have a present room, it's just the same, same thing.

[00:14:43] So in all your years of loving people, cause you say you love people. 

[00:14:48] Elena: I do. 

[00:14:48] Laure: All the time. So one of my questions that I ask people is when do you feel closer to your own soul? And when do you feel closer to other people's soul? If it's different, maybe it's the same.

[00:15:04] Elena: It's the same. 

[00:15:05] Laure: Okay. So when is that?

[00:15:07] Elena: A lot of the time. 

[00:15:09] Laure: All the time. Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:15:11] Elena: Ah, I love people. I feel that it's miraculous that we're both alive at the same time in contact. Yeah. So if I go and buy a cauliflower and I buy a cauliflower from someone, this is exciting because no one else is buying a cauliflower from them at that moment and the cauliflower becomes super special. Mother was rather like that. 

[00:15:39] Laure: Yeah. Your mother was rather like that. I knew her when I was teenager and it wasn't as obvious. She delighted in people if they did what she wanted. 

[00:15:48] Elena: It's not totally true, not...

[00:15:52] Laure: Not totally true, but that's the impression that I had. 

[00:15:59] Elena: She was nonjudgmental mother. 

[00:16:02] Laure: Maybe that was because I was 14 years old at the time. 

[00:16:05] Elena: Absolutely. 

[00:16:06] Laure: Cause it's also education and age. Cause in general, my grandmother's friends all wanted me to go their way. It wasn't special to your mother.

[00:16:14] It was just like, well of course, you know, young people should do what older people want them to do. Yeah. But I was never like that. I never accepted that. I could never see and it's not because I wasn't raised that way, cause I was, but for me, age was never a condition for obeying somebody. 

[00:16:36] Elena: That's quite right.

[00:16:38] Laure: Yeah. It got me into a lot of trouble. 

[00:16:40] Elena: Yeah. But it kept your self alive, darling.

[00:16:43] Laure: Somewhat, somewhat, not entirely, but somewhat. As I was saying the other day, you're one of the persons that I met through my grandma that I really felt that there was nothing I could do that would be wrong or nothing that I could say. If I said something that was not acceptable in other circles, you'd find it hilarious. Yeah. Yeah. Always very nice. Yeah. It was so lovely. 

[00:17:15] Elena: I've been like that. Yeah. I don't judge. Yeah. And I don't put people in boxes. 

[00:17:24] Laure: Well, and you delight in them. It's not just...

[00:17:26] Elena: I tell you, it's a present.

[00:17:28] Laure: Yeah. You delight and how people are, 

[00:17:30] Elena: Yeah and what they give me. I mean, as they come in, they give me such a lot it's very, very fantastic. I found it very, very difficult early this year when the two friends that died and then the third friend who died 10 years before came in at the same time. 

[00:17:56] Laure: Oh yeah. That's a lot. Well, of course, cause you know, you open the door like this every time you grieve, there's like, Hey, you've not done with that one.

[00:18:07] Elena: So all these three, I thought I was going mad for a little while. Because every time the phone rang, it was either one or the other. I kept telling myself, stop it. They are not going to call you. 

[00:18:26] Laure: That's why when you said this to me on the phone and my first instinct was like, oh, I'm going to call her more. And then I thought, no, I'm not going to call her more. Cause she's going to think that it's... 

[00:18:35] Elena: It was them. Sabina it's in the middle of the night still happening. Particularly Putin does something silly, which he does everyday. Charlotte, killed in a car crash in India many, many years ago. Yeah.

[00:18:52] Laure: Yeah. But many, many years ago, maybe, you know, didn't have the space to really go there. 

[00:19:00] Elena: She was killed. She just been to see the Taj Mahal and coming back, there was a military convoy and something was sticking out. So the driver went to close to a wood and this piece of tree came straight in and killed her outright.

[00:19:24] And the last time I spoke to her and that's magic, actually, she called me up and she said, you're the only person that will be able to help me. I said, how come, well she said he is going to be 21 in three days. I know he's staying with Hellie. I'm a send him some balloons.

[00:19:50] Laure: And you're the balloon lady. 

[00:19:55] Elena: Well I knew exactly where in LA you could get 30 balloons delivered! 

[00:20:03] Laure: And you have balloons behind you right now. 

[00:20:06] Elena: Yeah, exactly. So that was the last time I spoke to her. 

[00:20:12] Laure: It's crazy. How, when it's your time, it's your time. 

[00:20:15] Elena: Absolutely. 

[00:20:17] Laure: And when it's not your time, it's not your time. You know when my cousin was killed two years ago by her husband, I wrote to all my teachers. Cause I was like "help!". And, my teacher Francesca, who was my constellation teacher and she's a native American, she wrote me an email saying, you know, every death is a perfect death. You can't have another death than the one that you have. Cause she had been she's she's been a dreamer most of her life. So she's been dreaming of people's death since she was 14. And so she has obviously researched and really been interested in death and what it is, and she said, she came back to the indigenous wisdom, which is every birth is perfect and every death is perfect and it could never have been anything else. The honoring of what is, and she told me the story of her brother, cause she said people die in the most weird, strange ways.

[00:21:17] And they also don't die in weird, strange ways. And she told me, that's the story of her brother who fell off a damn, and who slid on his feet all the way down, standing up. And when he got to the bottom, the soles of his shoes were completely off and he hadn't a scratch.

[00:21:41] So it's, you know, like when it's not your time, it's not your time and when it is here, I think it's fascinating. I feel that, as hard as it is for us to accept, but there is something... 

[00:21:54] Elena: What is hard to accept? 

[00:21:56] Laure: Like how people die sometimes, you know, that it's so sometimes it seems senseless. 

[00:22:02] Elena: What's so hard?

[00:22:05] Laure: Well for a lot of people, it's really hard to accept when it's, when it's not like dying of old age. And when something that happens like a freak accident, it's hard to accept for a lot of people, you know? 

[00:22:17] Elena: And the shock is huge. 

[00:22:20] Laure: I feel that it's, there's a. I don't know. Like I never know that my grandmother is dead, she always feels... 

[00:22:29] Elena: Well maybe she's not.

[00:22:30] Laure: No, she's really not, she always feels... 

[00:22:33] Elena: Well she's around.

[00:22:34] Laure: She's around, but also she exists no matter what, whether she's here or not. 

[00:22:41] Elena: Oh je suis tout à fait d'accord. I don't think that people that we love die until I die.

[00:22:48] Laure: Exactly.

[00:22:50] Elena: When I die that part of that person inside me dies. Doesn't mean that that person didn't live in someone else. I have very interesting series of people coming upstairs when I come up to bed. 

[00:23:08] Laure: You have a line outside your door. 

[00:23:10] Elena: They're just behind me, all of them. 

[00:23:13] Laure: Yeah. I wonder about this because in general, I don't miss people. I'm pretty sure that's a strategy or that's something that I developed when I was a child, because otherwise, I would always have been missing someone because I was with my mom or with my dad. And so it kind of comes in handy with people who, either who are another continent and I can't see for like more than once every two years or for people who died. Cause I don't have that thing of like, oh, I miss them. Sometimes. 

[00:23:43] Elena: Well because they're there. 

[00:23:44] Laure: Well, yeah, I'm always carrying everybody with me in a way, which is great and not great, obviously. 

[00:23:51] Elena: Both.

[00:23:52] Laure: Because sometimes I know some of my decisions or whatever are maybe not entirely mine, but yeah, I never feel like they're gone. And also it's so temporary, you know. 

[00:24:02] Elena: People aren't dead, as long as you've known them and they've been a significant part of your inner world. You can't decide. Well, it's a weed now because the person's dead so the memory in the heart is a weed, so you could pull it out and throw it out. It's not a weed and it grows with the years because you understand them differently. 

[00:24:32] Laure: Yeah. That's absolutely... since my grandmother died, which was maybe 2014. So yeah, eight years ago. I've discovered new sides of her, not just through getting through her papers and reading her stuff, but also because I'm growing older and so I can understand some... My perception is changing.... That's really interesting. That's really interesting because it's not connected to anything new that I'm learning about her or anything, it's just that I'm growing older. And so I, I understand things differently in who she was. 

[00:25:12] Yeah. Well, we're gonna wrap this up, so thank you. Has it been on? Yeah.

[00:25:17] Elena: I didn't realize you were doing it? 

[00:25:18] Laure: Yes. Oh, that's good. I'm glad. 

[00:25:21] Elena: I thought any minute she's going to, but I could see the little light. 

[00:25:26] Laure: Yeah, thank you. That was beautiful. And there's a lot of stuff in there that people will be happy to hear.

[00:25:33] Elena: I hope.

[00:25:34] Laure: Thank you for listening to this first season of the Moonlit Path podcast. I hope you will be back in August for the second. In the meantime, if you know anyone who would be a good guest for this podcast, who has something to say about stories and soul and creativity, you can leave me a message either on Instagram or through my website by email and suggest that person to me as a guest.