ERICA
BRINKER

The Night Everything Changed

In December 2015, just after Thanksgiving, Erica and Steve went on their first date night since Luca was born. They came home, went to bed. In the middle of the night, Steve went to check on him. Luca wasn’t breathing. He wasn’t moving. He was four months and ten days old.

Erica tried CPR. She called an ambulance. It was too late. Luca had died in his sleep. Approximately 3,400 infants die of sudden unexpected causes in the United States every year, and SIDS accounts for roughly 1,389 of those losses.

In the car on the way home from the hospital, Erica called her mother. She had to say it twice before her mother understood.

The Silence That Followed

At first, people showed up. Family flew in, friends arrived, the house was full for weeks. Then it emptied. And what struck Erica most was that nobody said Luca’s name. Not friends, not family, not even her own mother, who told Erica she didn’t bring him up because she didn’t want to ruin a good day.

"If you don’t say something, you’re more upset," Erica says. "As a mother, you want to talk about them because you don’t want them to be erased from your family history."

She went back to work a week after his death. Not because she was ready but because she needed routine, needed purpose, needed something besides the walls of the house where he’d been alive. She also made a decision early: she and Steve would not become a statistic. Studies suggest that the strain of losing a child can lead to separation in as many as 40–80% of couples, and protecting the marriage was her first priority.

What She Built in His Name

On the first anniversary of Luca’s death, Erica threw a party. A celebration of life with bounce houses and face painters, where she asked everyone to do a good deed in his name and bring canned goods for a food pantry. She did it every year until COVID.

She also launched Inspired by Luca, a blog where she wrote about her own experience and invited others to share their stories. She highlighted people doing good in the world who would never be recognized otherwise. It was cathartic. It was probably also avoidance. But it was the first sign of what would eventually become At the Brink.

Five Years, Three Miscarriages, and the Road to Sayers

Erica wanted Sasha, her firstborn daughter, to have a sibling. After Luca died, she asked Steve to reverse his vasectomy. What she assumed would happen easily became a five-year journey through infertility: two rounds of failed IVF, three miscarriages, and the particular cruelty of loss layered on top of loss. Roughly 1 in 8 couples in the U.S. experience difficulty getting pregnant or sustaining a pregnancy, and for women over 40, IVF success rates average between 10 and 20 percent per cycle.

After the third miscarriage, Erica stopped feeling excitement at a positive test. She stopped telling people. She went to weekly hormone checks with no hope at all. Until the tenth week, when the ultrasound room heard a heartbeat and everyone in the office cried. Her doctor told her she’d graduated.

Sayers was born weighing nine pounds ten ounces, screaming. Erica was 42. She almost felt like Luca brought him to her.

The Second Half

After more than two decades as a corporate executive, Erica is building something new. She calls herself a recovering corporate executive and says something inside her has shifted in a way she can’t fully explain.

“I drive my husband nuts at parties because I get into conversations with people and he can’t drag me out of there,” she says. “This podcast is really just me having conversations with people who have been through great things, unthinkable things, tragic things, and allowing people to peer into the lives of others.”

At the Brink is a continuation of what started when Luca died: the belief that if people hear themselves in someone else’s story, they feel less alone. Some guests are well known. Some are people you’ll never hear of again. The point, Erica says, is that everybody has a story.

Erica Brinker is the host of At the Brink, a podcast exploring reinvention, resilience and the moments that fundamentally reshape who we become. 

Learn more about Erica. 

The Gift of Luca

Erica loves her family. It is her favorite thing in the world. Losing Luca changed how she thinks about work, about problems, about what deserves her worry. If you can get through that, she says, you can get through anything.

“I really try to give people grace because you truly never know what someone has been through or what’s happening in that day,” she says. “That’s the gift of Luca, is that you get to pause and reflect on things that are really important.”

What He Started

Ten years later, parents who have lost children still reach out to Erica. People she has never met tell her what they did in Luca’s name. He was on this earth for four months and ten days, and his mother has spent every year since making sure that wasn’t the end of his story.

“I hope he knows that he had such a bigger impact than the time that he was here,” she says. “And he’s changed a lot of people’s lives.”

She knows he wouldn’t want her to suffer. And the thing she has learned, standing at her own brink, is that the silence is always worse than the wrong words.