Recovery of Stroke

Seven years ago, after her stroke, Karen Kolberg remembered only one poem. It reminded her to "keep squeezing drops of the sun from your prayers, your work, your music, and from your companion's beautiful laughter."
She'll tell you that reciting those words in her mind, over and over again, saved her life.
When the stroke came, Kolberg had been performing from memory the works of 14th-century poet-philosopher Hafiz for an audience at Club Timbuktu. In her brain, the wall between an artery and vein burst. She began to drip sweat and forget the poems. In the ambulance, she felt herself dissolving.
"There was no fear, because that's a concept," Kolberg recalls. "There was no peace either, because that's a concept. There was no ego to be afraid or not afraid, to be in love or not in love. It's not like I died and came back. I was just go ing."
When Kolberg woke up, she was mute and, except for her big toe and pointer finger, paralyzed on her right side. The stroke, she believed, halved her life into "before" and "after." Still, Kolberg knew she'd been lucky to survive and to eventually recover her speech and mobility.
One recent evening, standing before a small audience gathered in the Schlitz Audubon Center, she worries that the 350 poems she's memorized since her stroke may permanently divide her body and mind.