For eight and a half years, Rikki Jo Neyer watched her mother slowly disappear into an illness no one could name. Her mother wore sunglasses inside the house because light had become unbearable. She eventually experienced catatonia that went unrecognized. Now, Neyer is telling the story of those years and the extraordinary recovery that followed in her debut book, Do You Believe in Miracles? Our Journey Out of Darkness and Into the Light. The book asks what it costs to love someone through the unthinkable when answers do not come and faith is stretched almost beyond recognition.
Neyer did not set out to become an author. "I set out to survive a season that felt impossible," she says. "For eight and a half years I watched my mother disappear into an illness no doctor could name, and I realized that if I did not write it down, the world might never know what she went through." Her mother could not always advocate for herself, so Neyer became her voice, a role familiar to countless caregivers navigating medical uncertainty, exhaustion, and fear.
The book does not rush toward a triumphant ending. Instead, Neyer deliberately invites readers into the darkness her family endured before revealing what happened when her mother was finally treated for catatonia. "Most miracle stories begin with the miracle and work backward," Neyer explains. "This one makes you live through every year of the darkness before you get there." After years of decline, her mother received Ativan and woke from the catatonic state. Her mother later summarized the experience: "I did die. And God brought me back."
For Neyer, the recovery did not erase the years before it but gave them new purpose. Writing the book required returning to painful memories. "This book required me to go back into rooms I had worked very hard to leave," she says. "The dark years, the doubt, the moments when my faith was barely a thread." She resisted the temptation to make those memories easier or more palatable. "The reader who is sitting in their own dark room right now does not need a polished version of suffering," she says. "They need the truth."
That honesty distinguishes Do You Believe in Miracles? from a traditional inspirational memoir. The book brings together faith, caregiving, medical questions, family experience, and firsthand testimony. It includes four interviews with key witnesses, a scientific summary of catatonia, Scripture, and appendices for caregivers, people struggling to keep going, and those supporting loved ones. Neyer's experience as her mother's primary advocate gives these resources particular weight.
She hopes the book will reach other families asking similar questions. "I hope caregivers feel seen in a way that nothing else has made them feel seen," Neyer says. "I hope anyone who has ever loved someone through a darkness that has no name finds language for what they have been carrying." She also hopes it encourages readers facing unexplained symptoms or misdiagnosis to keep asking questions.
Beneath the medical questions is the question in the title: Do you believe in miracles? Neyer does. "And I hope every reader who has ever wondered whether God still finds people in the darkest places finds their answer here," she says. "He does. I am living proof. My mother is living proof." The years transformed her understanding of beauty, suffering, and faith. She came to see beauty and suffering as companions, and hope present even when circumstances offer little evidence of change.
She describes the journey in three words: "Witness. Endure. Return." "I witnessed what happened to my mother and to our family," she explains. "I endured the process of putting it on the page and going back into rooms I had worked very hard to leave. And through the writing, I returned to myself. I returned to hope. I returned to a version of faith that had been tested in every possible way and was still standing."
Perhaps most importantly, the book is being published while Neyer and her mother can share the story together. Her mother is alive, participated in the book, and after eight and a half years that once seemed to have stolen so much, mother and daughter are making up for lost time. The book is published by Lucid Books, an independent, hybrid publisher in the Houston area.
