It was a normal workday for Jennifer Rose Goldman. Until it wasn’t.

On Aug. 18, 2021, just a few days before her 31st birthday, Goldman suffered a massive stroke that left her in a coma for three weeks, clinging to life. “My brain died a violent death on an otherwise tranquil Wednesday morning,” Goldman writes in the book she and her mother, Caryn Meg Hirshleifer, 70, wrote to reflect on their journey of healing.

Goldman remembers little of that morning. “I woke up feeling fine and meditated for close to an hour before driving to work,” she writes in the book, “ In the Face of Catastrophe: How a Traumatic Brain Injury Became a Blessing ” (Greenleaf). Looking back, about all she remembers is that she “felt strange.”

Sitting with her mother in her basement office at Hirshleifer’s, the

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