ORINDA, Calif. — Helen Bolling likes to tell a story about the time she saved her own life.

To really tell it right, however, requires audience participation. Before you can protest, the 72-year-old grandmother will drop down to the floor — all five feet and 3/4 inches of her — lay flat on her back, and then convince you to straddle her, with your hands wrapped around her throat, just to demonstrate how her quick thinking kept her alive.

"I didn't kick him in the groin," she says, her sparkling blue eyes lighting up when you fail to guess her next move. "That's what everybody guesses!"

What did she do to save her life? She did nothing. "I shut my eyes, and I let my body relax," she says.

Her passive resistance shocked her attacker out of his rage, as Bolling tells it, and he released her in a fit of regretful tears.

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"I played my odds, and the odds were that he'd let me go," she says.

Bolling reenacted the "near-death experience" for Courttv.com in early April, after an extensive TV interview with "Catherine Crier Live" about her 48-year-old daughter and murder defendant Susan Polk.

It's also the same story she shared — minus the demonstrative theatrics — with jurors in a Contra Costa County courthouse Monday.

Bolling took the stand to testify in defense of her daughter, who is on trial for first-degree murder in the stabbing death of her 70-year-old psychologist husband Felix Polk.

"All that thinking seems as fast as a bullet," Bolling says. "And the decisions you make will determine whether you live or die."

What's interesting about the anecdote, and what Bolling chose not to reveal to jurors Monday, is that the man she claims almost choked her to death was her former husband.

Though she prefers that Courttv.com not refer to him by name, she says her husband attacked her when she was about 29, because she wouldn't grant him a divorce.

"It is strange," Bolling said, regarding the similarities to her own daughter's alleged predicament, and the difference in their responses. "I've thought of that myself."

Susan Polk was also in a nasty divorce battle when, as she tells it, her husband came at her with a knife in a rage.

But at the end of Polk's story, there is a dead man with some 27 wounds over his body and Polk — still in jail nearly four years later — claiming she stabbed him in self-defense.

Motive to kill?

Two of Polk's three sons say that Susan Polk was delusional and had been planning to kill her husband long before Oct. 14, 2002, when police found his bloody body on the floor of a poolside cottage on the couple's $1.85 million property.

Prosecutors say she was motivated to murder by the news that she was on the losing side of the divorce: She was about to lose custody of her son, Gabriel, the Orinda home, and a significant portion of her spousal support.

But Bolling told Courttv.com that she is not even certain that her daughter actually stabbed Felix. She says the act required a kind of rage she has never witnessed in the woman she still calls "boo-boo Susie" and "my baby." (VIDEO)

She has obliquely noted, both to reporters and to the jury Monday, that the couple's youngest son, Gabriel, acted with rage when he smashed in the windshield of his father's car shortly before his death.

Gabriel, 19, who is not charged with any wrongdoing and has cooperated fully with investigators, declined to comment about his estranged grandmother's remarks.

His guardian, Marjorie Briner, told Courttv.com that the window-bashing incident was instigated by Susan Polk, and it is something Gabriel hopes to address when he returns to the stand during his mother's case.

Bolling admits she has no knowledge of what happened the night of her son-in-law's death. But if her "Little Susan" did stab Felix, Bolling says, it was only after she warned him, "I have the knife, I have the knife," as if to say, Don't make me use it on you. (VIDEO)

Bolling also admits she not a witness to Felix's alleged physical abuse. She was estranged from the family for many years, she says, because Felix didn't want her around "and that was that."

But it was Bolling who first delivered her daughter to Felix.

Dr. Frank "Felix" Polk was a 40-year-old married father of two when Helen Bolling brought her 14- or 15-year-old daughter, Susan Mae Bolling, to him in 1972 for psychotherapy.

While Bolling's passivity may have saved her life when she was a young wife under attack, her passive behavior as a mother when she discovered Susan and Felix were in a sexual entanglement, is a decision that still haunts her.