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A woman I had been nodding at for almost a year at my mother's assisted living facility sat down at my table in the visitors' lounge last October.

She said: I can't do another Sunday in this room by myself. Is it alright if I sit at your table?

I said yes.

Two hours later, when she stood up to leave, she had said one sentence to me that has been with me every day since.

I am writing this letter because I had been carrying two people quietly for the eighteen months before that Sunday.

My eighty-six-year-old mother, in her assisted living room forty minutes from my house.

And my sixty-seven-year-old husband, in our living room.

That woman gave me back one of them.

My name is Joan.

I live in a small town outside Buffalo with my husband, Greg.

We have been married for thirty-seven years.

Greg was a project manager at a manufacturing plant for forty-one years.

He retired three years ago.

We have one son and one daughter, both in their thirties, both living within an hour of us.

I retired four years ago after thirty-two years of doing the office administration for our parish.

We were, on paper, supposed to be entering the easiest years of our life.

My mother, Rita, is eighty-six.

She fell in her own kitchen eighteen months ago.

She broke her hip and recovered the way an eighty-six-year-old recovers from a broken hip, which is mostly but not all the way.

She has been living at a small assisted living facility called Linden Grove since then.

My brother lives in Cleveland and comes when he can.

I visit on Sundays.

Sometimes Wednesdays, when I can.

I bring her a small bag of clementines because she has loved clementines since I was a little girl.

She remembers some things and forgets others.

She is still my mother and she is mostly herself and the gap between mostly and entirely is the gap I have been quietly grieving for eighteen months.

My husband, Greg, is sixty-seven.

He has no medical diagnosis I could name for you.

He is not on any prescription medications.

His doctor — Dr. Anderson, a careful man we have been seeing for twenty-one years — had been mentioning, at Greg's last three annual physicals, that his cholesterol numbers had been creeping.

He had been telling Greg that we were getting close to the point where he was going to want to put him on something small.

Greg had been telling Dr. Anderson that he wanted six more months to work on it on his own.

Dr. Anderson had been giving him six more months.

That was the clinical version of where Greg was.

The version I had been living with was harder to put into words.

It looked like this.

It looked like the golf clubs in the corner of the garage, where Greg had set them down after his Saturday morning round eighteen months ago, sitting in exactly the same spot every Saturday morning since.

It looked like the truck Greg had washed every other Saturday for forty years, sitting in the driveway with road dust on it for the better part of a year.

It looked like Greg sitting in his recliner at three in the afternoon, falling asleep with the newspaper open on his lap, in a way he had never been a man who napped.

It looked like our evening walk — a mile and a half around the neighborhood, every night for twenty-six years — shrinking to four blocks and then three blocks and then around the block, with Greg waiting on the porch when I went the rest of the way alone.

It looked like Greg, at sixty-seven, declining quietly in our living room at the same time that I was driving to Linden Grove on Sundays to visit my mother declining quietly in hers.

I had been telling myself it was retirement.

I had been telling myself it was sixty-seven.

I had been telling myself it was the year my mother fell.

I had been telling myself a lot of things.

October last year, on a Sunday afternoon, I was sitting at a small round table in the visitors' lounge at Linden Grove.

The lounge is called the Sunshine Room because it has windows on three sides.

My mother had been moved to the medical wing that morning.

She had a small infection. Nothing serious. They were keeping her on antibiotics for a few days.

I was sitting in the Sunshine Room waiting for the nurse to come tell me when I could go back and see her.

I was on my third paper cup of bad coffee.

I was not in a good way.

A woman I had been nodding at in the hallway at Linden Grove for almost a year sat down at the table next to mine.

She was about my age.

Silver hair, cut short.

A canvas tote bag with a paperback book in it.

She set the bag down and put her elbows on the table and her face in her hands for a moment.

Then she looked up at me and said: I can't do another Sunday by myself in this room. Is it alright if I sit at your table?

I said yes.

She moved her coffee over.

She told me her name was Patricia.

She told me she went by Trish.

She told me she had been visiting her father at Linden Grove for three years.

I told her I had been visiting my mother for eighteen months.

We sat at that table for two hours.

I am not going to give you the whole conversation.

It is the conversation two women in their late fifties or early sixties have when they have been quietly doing the same thing alone for too long and finally find someone else who is also quietly doing it.

We talked about our parents.

We talked about the gap between mostly and entirely.

We talked about the moment you realize your mother is not coming back to where she was.

We talked about siblings who are far away.

We talked about the way Sunday afternoons in the Sunshine Room are very long.

About an hour and a half in, Trish said something offhand about her husband.

She said: I am tired in a way that has me worried, because my husband, Ron, is tired the same way. He is sixty-nine. He has been quietly slowing down for years.

I cannot afford to be slowing down at the same time he is, because there is no one else for either of these old people.

I told her about Greg.

I told her about the golf clubs in the garage.

I told her about the truck.

I told her about the four blocks shrinking to around the block.

I told her about the recliner at three in the afternoon.

Trish listened.

She nodded.

When I was finished, she sat with it for a minute.

Then she said something I have been thinking about every day since.

She said: About two years ago I added one small thing to Ron's mornings. I read for almost a month before I added it. I talked to his doctor and to his pharmacist before I added it. I want to be very careful with you about what I say next, because Ron is one man and you are looking at one man and bodies are different.

But Ron has been more himself, for the last two years, than he was for the four years before that. He has been present at our kitchen table.

He has been doing the small Saturday things he had stopped doing. He has been a man I recognize again.

She paused.

I did not give him anything in particular. I added one small additional thing to a long list of things he was already doing.

I kept everything else exactly the same. I would not want you to think I am telling you a fireworks story. I am telling you what happened in our house, alongside everything else we did.

I asked her what she had added.

She said it was a beetroot capsule.

She said the brand was called Rosabella.

She said she had picked it because the small company that made it cold-pressed the beetroot at low temperatures rather than processing it with heat, and because Ron's doctor had specifically said that how the beetroot was processed mattered for what would make it from the field into the capsule.

She said it the way a woman who has been carrying a load alone tells another woman who has been carrying a load alone what she has been doing.

She wasn't selling me anything.

She was just telling me.

The nurse came in about half an hour later to say I could go back and see my mother.

I sat with her for an hour.

I drove home thinking about Trish.

I drove the rest of that week thinking about Trish.

By the weekend, I was thinking about what I was going to do.

I went home and I started reading.

I read for almost three weeks.

I am, by temperament, a careful person.

I do not add things to my body or to my husband's body without understanding what I am adding.

I read about beetroot.

I read about the deep crimson pigment in the root.

It is called betalain.

It is the color that stains your cutting board for three days.

It is also, according to a long, patient body of research the cardiovascular community has been quietly building for decades, one of the more potent antioxidants in the food supply.

I read about the long, slowly built relationship the careful structure-function research has had with this vegetable.

In the context of supporting healthy circulation.

Supporting cardiovascular wellness.

Supporting the body's own cellular energy.

In people whose numbers are already in the range their doctors want them in.

None of what I read was a fireworks story.

It was the opposite of one.

It was a vegetable that has been quietly studied for a long time by careful people who were not making outlandish claims.

The language being used in the careful corner of the conversation was the language I had been quietly hoping to find.

Supports healthy circulation.

Supports cardiovascular wellness.

Supports the body's own cellular energy.

Not lowers cholesterol.

Not fixes anything.

Not replaces what Dr. Anderson had been wanting to put Greg on.

That was the right shape.

I read about the cold-press, too.

The chemistry is straightforward.

The betalain pigment is heat-sensitive.

If you process beetroot the standard way, with heat, you lose some of the compound to the heat.

Rosabella cold-presses at low temperatures because they want as much of the compound as possible to make it from the field into the capsule.

That is a slower way to make a supplement.

It costs them more.

At sixty, after watching my mother lose her independence in eighteen months and my husband lose his Saturday rituals over the same eighteen months, I have come to pay close attention to the small decisions companies make when no one is watching.

Those decisions tell you everything.

The other thing I liked was the simplicity.

Two capsules in the morning with a glass of water.

I have a mother forty minutes away.

I have a husband on the couch.

I have a small life I am trying to hold together.

I am not interested in a protocol that requires its own shelf.

Now I need to tell you the most important part of this letter.

Before I added it to anything Greg was already doing, I called our pharmacist.

His name is Paul.

He is the pharmacist at the small independent pharmacy in our town.

I have been filling things there for over twenty years.

I called him for a specific reason.

Greg is on no prescription medications.

He takes a multivitamin and a vitamin D in the winter.

I called Paul anyway.

I called because I am a careful person and because I wanted somebody who knew what was on Greg's chart to confirm that adding a beetroot capsule to a multivitamin was the right thing to do at his age.

Paul pulled up Greg's profile.

He confirmed there were no concerns at the dosage on the label.

He told me Greg could take it in the morning with his coffee the way the bottle suggested.

He told me to call him back if Dr. Anderson ever started Greg on any prescription medication in the future, because the conversation would be different at that point.

He told me, before he got off the phone, that he wished more of his patients made the call I had just made.

I also called Dr. Anderson's office that week.

I told the nurse what I was thinking about adding for Greg.

I told her the brand and the dosage.

She talked to Dr. Anderson and called me back the next day.

She told me Dr. Anderson had said it was a sensible thing to add — antioxidant support, no concerns at the dosage on the label, nothing to interact with anything Greg was taking — and to let him know how Greg was doing at his next appointment.

I want to say something now, plainly, to every reader of this letter.

If your husband — or your wife, or your father, or your mother, or the person you are caring for, or you yourself — is on any prescription medication, especially anything cardiovascular, please make the call before you add anything new.

I called Paul, and I called Dr. Anderson's office, and Greg was on nothing.

I would have called twice as fast if Greg had been on a cardiovascular prescription.

So should you.

The people who know the chart will tell you in two minutes whether the supplement is safe to add, given what is already being taken.

The two minutes the call takes is the most important two minutes of your engagement with any supplement you might consider adding.

I told Greg that night.

I told him about Trish.

I told him about the reading.

I told him about Paul and Dr. Anderson.

I told him I wanted him to try it for me.

He looked at the bottle.

He looked at me.

We have been married thirty-seven years.

He knows when I am asking something that matters.

Dr. Anderson said it was alright?

He said it was a sensible thing to add.

He nodded once.

Alright. For you.

In the morning I set two capsules on a saucer next to his coffee.

He took them with his first sip.

I did not say anything more about it.

He started on a Monday.

The first two weeks he felt nothing in particular.

I had read enough alongside what Trish had told me to know that bodies are different.

Some people notice something within the first week or two.

Some take much longer.

Some don't notice much at all.

I was prepared to land in any of those camps.

I was prepared to be honest with myself about the result.

What I noticed, I noticed slowly.

The first thing I noticed, around week six, was the truck.

It was a Saturday morning.

I was at the kitchen window with my coffee.

Greg was in the driveway with a bucket of soapy water and a sponge.

He had not washed his truck in fourteen months.

He washed it for almost an hour.

He waxed it after.

He came inside with the back of his shirt damp and asked me what I wanted for lunch.

I made him a sandwich.

I did not say anything about the truck.

I did not want to make a thing of it.

I had read enough not to make a thing of one observation.

The second thing I noticed, around week ten, was the long loop.

We had been doing the short loop — around the block, four hundred yards, with Greg waiting on the porch when I went the rest of the way alone — for almost a year.

One evening in early March, I came out the back door with my walking shoes on and Greg was already on the sidewalk in his own.

He said: let's do the long one tonight.

We did the long one.

A mile and a half.

He did not stop.

We finished at our porch and we sat on it for half an hour, the way we used to sit on it after the long loop, and we watched the sky go from purple to dark.

He went to bed at ten that night.

The next evening we did the long loop again.

The evening after that, again.

The third thing I noticed was at Linden Grove.

About four months in, Greg asked me on a Sunday morning whether I would mind if he came with me to visit my mother.

He had been coming with me, before, every other Sunday.

He had stopped coming about a year ago.

He had stopped because the visits exhausted him, and because the drive back was hard on his back, and because he could not, on top of everything else, sit in the Sunshine Room for two hours and be present.

He asked me on a Sunday morning if he could come.

I told him yes.

We drove to Linden Grove together.

He sat with my mother for an hour.

He helped her with her water glass at lunch.

He told her a story about our son that she had not heard before.

She brightened at it.

She held his hand at the end of lunch and she said: Gregory, you are a good boy.

She has called him Gregory since the first time he had Sunday dinner at my parents' house, when he was twenty-three years old and she did not yet know whether she trusted him with me.

She said it the same way that night.

He squeezed her hand.

I sat across the table and I watched the man I had been married to for thirty-seven years be present for an entire Sunday afternoon at my mother's assisted living facility.

I had not had him present for that, in any meaningful way, for fourteen months.

I made a quiet note.

I did not want to make a thing of it.

I want to be careful with what I am telling you.

I am writing this to people I do not know.

I am not telling you Rosabella did any of those things on its own.

Greg had been resting more.

He had been doing the lifestyle work he had been telling Dr. Anderson he wanted to do.

I had been quietly leaving his walking shoes by the back door for two months before the long loop happened.

I had been making the kinds of small dinners that someone with his numbers should be eating.

Something had unlocked in him, the day I came home from Linden Grove the Sunday I met Trish, that had nothing to do with a capsule on a saucer.

There were several things changing at once, the way there are when a woman finally finds someone to carry the load with.

All I am telling you is that he added one small thing to a long list of small things he was newly doing.

He kept everything else exactly the same.

And a stretch of months followed that was qualitatively different from the eighteen months that had preceded it.

That is the honest version.

I would not give you a cleaner one.

Greg went to Dr. Anderson for his annual physical about seven months after he started.

Bloodwork the week before.

Dr. Anderson studied the results.

He looked at Greg.

He said: your numbers are in better shape than they have been in three years. Keep doing what you are doing.

Greg told him about the walking.

About the beetroot.

About starting to come to Linden Grove with me.

Dr. Anderson nodded.

He said: that is a sensible thing to add. There is good research on antioxidant support. Keep doing what you are doing and let's see where you are in another six months.

He did not bring up medication.

He had not brought it up in two appointments now.

Greg called me from the parking lot.

He didn't say anything at first.

Then he said: Joanie. I think I might be alright.

I was standing in our kitchen.

I sat down at the table.

I cried the way a woman cries when something she thought was leaving comes back to her instead.

Trish and I still see each other most Sundays at Linden Grove.

We have a small ritual now.

We meet in the Sunshine Room at noon on the Sundays when both of us are there.

We have coffee for fifteen minutes.

We tell each other small things about our parents and our husbands.

Then she goes to her father and I go to my mother.

Greg has come with me on three of the last six Sundays.

Twice he sat in the Sunshine Room with Trish's husband, Ron, after our visits ended, while Trish and I finished our coffee.

Two old men who, eighteen months ago, would not have made the drive to Linden Grove on a Sunday.

Sitting in the Sunshine Room with their wives.

I am telling you this because I think you might be where I was that Sunday in October.

Carrying two people quietly.

Watching the small things that used to be easy slowly stop being easy in someone you love.

Watching their doctor smile at numbers that look fine on a chart while the person attached to the numbers slowly dims.

If you have been carrying a quiet question for a year or two — alongside everything else you are already carrying — about whether there is one small additive thing that might support what is already working in his body, I want to say a few things to you carefully.

I do not know you.

I do not know your husband, your bloodwork, your situation, or what his doctor has said.

Bodies are different.

Some people notice something within the first week or two of adding something like this.

Some people take much longer.

Some people don't notice much at all.

That is the honest version.

Anyone offering you a cleaner one is selling you harder than I am.

Here is how I think about Rosabella now, in the words I would actually use.

It is something the body uses.

The research community talks about it in the context of supporting healthy circulation, cardiovascular wellness, and the body's own cellular energy.

In people whose numbers are already in the range their doctors want them in.

It is not a fix for anything.

It is not a substitute for anything his doctor has him on.

It is not a treatment for the burden you are carrying or the load on your shoulders or any of it.

It is one small thing you add to the long list of things he is already doing for himself, alongside everything else.

Please call his pharmacist or his doctor's office before you add it.

If he is on any blood pressure medication, or cholesterol medication, or anything cardiovascular at all, this is non-negotiable.

I called Paul.

I called Dr. Anderson's office.

I would not have added anything to a prescription without those calls.

Neither should you.

The people who know his chart will tell you in two minutes whether the supplement is safe to add given what he is already taking.

I am a sixty-year-old woman in upstate New York with a mother in assisted living and a husband I am trying to keep present at our kitchen table.

I am not the person to ask.

His pharmacist or his doctor is.

The company has a ninety-day satisfaction guarantee.

If you are not satisfied — for any reason at all, including just changing your mind — they refund you.

It is not tied to bloodwork.

It is not tied to anything you have to prove to anybody.

If you are not satisfied, you are not satisfied.

That is the whole policy.

The beets are grown on a small operation that harvests on its own schedule.

There are stretches when they are in stock and stretches when they are not.

I mention that not to push you — please do not let anybody push you into a health decision — but so that if you go to the site and they are out, you know why.

That is all I have.

Thank you for reading this far.

I hope something here was useful to you.

I hope, somewhere today, your own Trish is sitting at a small round table in a sunlit room, waiting for you to sit down across from her.

— Joan

P.S. I want to come back to the cold-press for a second.

The betalain pigment — the deep crimson, the part the research community keeps circling back to — is heat-sensitive.

That is the chemistry of the molecule.

If you process beetroot the standard way, with heat, you lose some of the compound to the heat.

Rosabella chose the slow way.

Cold-press. Low temperatures. More of the compound through to the capsule.

It costs them money. It costs them time.

They made the choice anyway.

At sixty, after watching what eighteen months can do to two of the people I love most in the world, I have come to pay attention to the small decisions companies make when no one is watching.

Those decisions tell you everything.

P.P.S. Two capsules. In the morning. With a glass of water.

That is the entire protocol.

No powder to mix.

No afternoon dose to remember.

No schedule taped to the inside of the cupboard.

Greg keeps the bottle on the kitchen counter next to the coffee maker.

He takes the capsules with his first sip.

I make the coffee.

That has been the rhythm of our morning for almost ten months.

We have earned a simple one at our age.

P.P.P.S. I am going to say it one more time, because I have to.

Please.

Call his pharmacist or his doctor's office before you add anything new to what he is already taking.

Especially if he is on a blood pressure medication, a cholesterol medication, or anything cardiovascular.

They have his whole picture in front of them.

I have written you a letter.

There is a difference, and the difference matters.

The two minutes it takes to ask are the most important two minutes of your engagement with any supplement.

P.P.P.P.S. The guarantee, again, in case you skimmed.

Ninety days. Any reason at all.

You do not have to prove a single thing — not to them, not about his numbers, not about how he feels.

If he tried it and you are not satisfied, you are not satisfied.

They send the money back.

That is the whole policy.

A small-company policy.

The kind of thing companies used to do when companies still answered the phone.

P.P.P.P.P.S. The thing Trish said to me at the small round table in the Sunshine Room — I cannot afford to be slowing down at the same time he is, because there is no one else for either of these old people — is the sentence that has stayed with me longest.

I had been thinking those exact words about my own situation for fourteen months.

I had never said them out loud to anyone.

I had not realized, until Trish said them, how heavy they had become.

If you are a woman carrying two people quietly the way I was — an aging parent on one side, a husband dimming on the other — I want you to know that you are not the only one.

You are not imagining the dimming.

You are not being dramatic.

You have been watching something real.

His doctor has been watching the chart.

You have been watching the man.

I hope you find your Trish.

I hope, if you have one already, you let yourself sit down at her table.

I hope you read carefully.

I hope you make the call before you add anything.

I hope, in a year from now, you are sitting in your own kitchen on a Saturday morning, watching the man you love wash his truck in the driveway, the way he used to wash it.

I hope that for you.

That is the whole reason I wrote this.

— J.

DISCLAIMER

Individual experiences vary. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
