Rikki Jo Neyer's New Book Chronicles Her Mother's Journey from Undiagnosed Catatonia to Recovery

For eight and a half years, Rikki Jo Neyer watched her mother slowly disappear into an illness that no one could name. Her mother wore sunglasses inside the house, not as a style choice, but because light had become something her brain could no longer tolerate without pain. The family searched for answers while the woman they loved retreated further into darkness, eventually experiencing what Neyer describes as catatonia that went unrecognized. Now, Neyer is telling the story of those years, the desperate fight to find answers, and the extraordinary recovery that followed in her debut book, Do You Believe in Miracles? Our Journey Out of Darkness and Into the Light.

At its heart, the book asks what it costs to love someone through the unthinkable when answers do not come, hope becomes difficult to hold, and even faith is stretched almost beyond recognition. For Neyer, writing the book was never about becoming an author. "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." Her mother could not always advocate for herself, so Neyer became her voice.

The experience placed Neyer in a role familiar to countless caregivers: loving someone fiercely while simultaneously navigating medical uncertainty, unanswered questions, exhaustion, fear, and the growing realization that no one else may fight for a loved one quite as relentlessly as family will. The book does not rush readers toward a triumphant ending or sanitize the years that preceded it. 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."

Then came the moment that changed everything. After years of decline and uncertainty, Neyer's mother received Ativan and woke from the catatonic state Neyer describes in the book. Her mother would later summarize what happened to her in words that became central to the family's understanding of her experience: "I did die. And God brought me back." For Neyer, her mother's recovery did not erase the years that came before it. Instead, it gave those years a new purpose and compelled her to tell the full story, including the parts that were painful to revisit.

Neyer admits that one of the most difficult parts of writing was resisting the temptation to make those memories easier or more palatable than they actually were. "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 also includes four interviews with key witnesses, a scientific summary of catatonia, Scripture, and appendices written specifically for caregivers, people struggling to keep going, and those trying to support someone they love.

Neyer's own experience as her mother's primary advocate gives those resources particular weight. For nearly a decade, she lived the reality of watching someone she loved suffer while fighting to find an explanation for what was happening. She hopes the book will now reach other families who find themselves asking questions that sound painfully familiar. "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 her family's experience encourages readers facing unexplained symptoms or a diagnosis that does not seem to account for what they are witnessing. "I hope anyone sitting with a misdiagnosis or fighting to be believed by a medical system that keeps looking away finds courage in these pages to keep asking questions," she says. Yet beneath the medical questions and the realities of caregiving is the question contained in the book's 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 Neyer spent caring and advocating for her mother also transformed her understanding of beauty, suffering, and faith. She came to see that beauty and suffering are not necessarily opposites, but companions, and that hope can remain present even when circumstances offer little evidence that anything will change. She describes the journey of writing the book in three words: "Witness. Endure. Return." "I witnessed what happened to my mother and to our family," Neyer 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, Do You Believe in Miracles? 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 from their family, mother and daughter are making up for lost time. The book is published by Lucid Books, an independent, hybrid publisher in the Houston area that helps authors inspire, inform, and enrich the lives of their readers.