Rikki Jo Neyer has released her debut book, Do You Believe in Miracles? Our Journey Out of Darkness and Into the Light, which chronicles her mother’s eight-and-a-half-year struggle with an undiagnosed illness that left her in a catatonic state, and her subsequent recovery after treatment with Ativan. Published by Lucid Books, the memoir provides a harrowing yet hopeful account of caregiving, medical uncertainty, and faith.
For nearly a decade, Neyer watched her mother retreat into what she describes as an unrecognized catatonia. Her mother could not tolerate light without pain, wearing sunglasses indoors, and her family searched desperately for answers. “I did not set out to become an author,” Neyer says. “I set out to survive a season that felt impossible. 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.”
Neyer’s role as her mother’s primary advocate placed her in a situation familiar to countless caregivers: fighting for a loved one while navigating a medical system that often fails to provide answers. The book does not shy away from the darkest moments. “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.”
The turning point came when Neyer’s mother received Ativan and woke from her catatonic state. Her mother later said, “I did die. And God brought me back.” That recovery, while miraculous, did not erase the years of suffering. Instead, it gave Neyer a new purpose: to tell the full story, including the parts that were painful to revisit. “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.”
Neyer deliberately avoided sanitizing her experience. “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 sets the book apart from traditional inspirational memoirs. It combines faith, caregiving, medical questions, and firsthand testimony, and includes four interviews with key witnesses, a scientific summary of catatonia, Scripture, and appendices for caregivers and those supporting loved ones.
The book’s release matters because it gives voice to a reality many families face but few discuss openly: the isolation and exhaustion of caring for someone with an unexplained illness. Neyer hopes the book will reach others in similar situations. “I hope caregivers feel seen in a way that nothing else has made them feel seen,” she 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 encourages those facing misdiagnosis to keep asking questions.
At its core, the memoir asks the question in its title. Neyer’s answer is unequivocal. “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.”
Neyer describes the journey of writing in three words: “Witness. Endure. Return.” Through the process, she returned to hope and to a tested faith. Crucially, her mother is alive, participated in the book, and mother and daughter are now making up for lost time. The book is available from Lucid Books, an independent hybrid publisher in the Houston area.
