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My wife and I have been married for thirty-eight years.

For about three of them, I had been slowly disappearing on her.

And I had not had the courage to tell her so.

I'm sixty-three years old.

We met at the community college where she was studying to be a paralegal and I was finishing my associate's in HVAC, and we got married eighteen months later, which is something neither of us recommends to our children.

It worked out for us. It mostly doesn't.

The disappearing I'm talking about did not happen all at once.

It almost never does.

It happened the way these things happen — in small pieces over a long time, none of which I noticed individually, all of which I could see clearly when I finally turned around and looked at the three years behind me.

I had been less present at the dinner table.

Less interested in the small things Linda wanted to tell me about her day.

Less inclined to suggest the small Saturday-afternoon outings we used to take — the drive to the orchard, the antique mall in Quakertown, the diner near the lake.

I had been falling asleep in my chair earlier in the evening.

Quieter on long drives where we used to talk for hours.

I had been, in ways I could feel but not put a name to, a smaller version of the man I had been for the first thirty-five years of our marriage.

I had also been telling myself it was normal.

I told myself it was age. I told myself it was the stress at the HVAC company, the weight of the responsibilities I had taken on there that did not go away when I got home in the evening.

I told myself it was the sleep that wasn't as good as it used to be, and the back that ached in the morning the way it didn't when I was forty-five, and the long winter we'd had two years running.

And I told myself, in the part of my mind I do not usually visit, that it was something else too.

Something I did not want to look at directly.

Something I had been carrying quietly for two or three years and had not said to anyone — including Linda, including myself in any way that would have required me to do something about it.

I had not done anything about it.

I had thought about doing something about it.

I had not done anything.

This is the part of the letter where the story actually starts.

Because the disappearing went on for almost three years before anything changed.

And what changed it was a weekend on a farm in Lancaster County, and a man on a porch on a Friday night in October, and a sentence about a horse.

Linda and I have two grown daughters.

The older one, Rebecca, lives twenty minutes from us in the suburbs of Allentown and works for the school district.

The younger one, Hannah, lives outside Lititz in Lancaster County, where she married into an Old Order Mennonite family eleven years ago.

Hannah, when she was twenty-three, took a job in Lancaster County for the summer doing administrative work at a small farm-equipment cooperative.

She met a young man named Aaron there — quiet and deliberate the same way she was — and over about two years she made a series of decisions that her mother and I could not have predicted but that, in retrospect, we should have.

She joined the church. She married Aaron. She moved onto the farm his family had owned for four generations, twelve miles east of Lititz.

She and Aaron have four children now. Linda and I see them about six times a year.

I am telling you all of this because the man who is the reason for this letter is Aaron's father.

His name is Eli.

Eli is eighty-three years old.

I want you to sit with that number for a moment, because the rest of this letter depends on it.

He still works the farm.

Not the way his sons work it — his sons handle the heavy hauling and the long days now — but he works it.

He milks in the mornings beside Aaron. He repairs the small things that need repairing.

He goes out into the field at six o'clock in the morning in March and he goes out into the field at six o'clock in the morning in November and he comes in for the noon meal and he eats with the same appetite he has had for sixty years and he goes back out in the afternoon.

He is not infirm. He is not in decline.

He is eighty-three and he is, in the small ordinary way that tells you everything, present in his life.

That is the word I had been looking for, for three years.

Present.

Linda and I drove down to Lancaster County for our usual long weekend on a Friday afternoon in October two years ago.

It rained for most of the drive.

Linda fell asleep in the passenger seat the way she has fallen asleep in the passenger seat for thirty-eight years, and I drove the last hour listening to the radio with the volume low, thinking about how few long drives we had taken together that year.

We used to drive places. We used to take the long route home from Hannah's, through Reading, just to stretch out the day.

I had not done that in two years.

We had been driving down on Friday and back on Sunday, the most direct way both directions.

The difference was small. But it was a difference. And I had noticed it and said nothing.

We got to the farm a little before six. Hannah and Anna had supper waiting. Eli came in from the barn. The grandchildren ran around the kitchen the way grandchildren do.

After supper, the men sat on the front porch while the women cleaned the kitchen. That is how it goes on the farm, and Linda and I have learned, over eleven years, not to argue with the rhythm of a house that is not ours.

Aaron went out to check on something in the barn.

It was Eli and me on the porch.

Eli is a quiet man. He talks when he has something to say and he does not when he doesn't.

He had been watching me at supper. I had not been talkative. After we had sat in silence for about ten minutes, he said, in the careful way he says things:

George, you have been quiet this weekend in a way I have not seen you be quiet.

I will tell you what I told him, because I am going to ask you to extend me the same dignity I am extending to myself in telling it.

I told him I had been feeling for the past few years like I was slowly becoming a smaller version of myself, in ways I could not put my finger on.

I told him I had been telling myself it was age.

I told him I had been telling myself it was stress.

I told him I had not done anything about it because I had not known what to do.

Eli sat with that for a long time. He is not a man who rushes a response.

He said: I have been an old man for some time now, George. The body changes. That is not the question. The question is whether you are paying attention to your own body the way you would pay attention to a horse that wasn't pulling right.

I asked him what he meant.

He said: If a horse was off, you would know within a week. You would look at the harness. You would look at the feed. You would look at the legs. You would not tell yourself it was age and let the horse keep pulling.

I sat with that for a long time.

He said one more thing before Aaron came back from the barn.

He said: I am eighty-three. I am still on this farm because I have paid attention to this body the way I have paid attention to this land. The body is the land you live on, George. Tend it.

Aaron came back and we talked about the price of feed and the weather forecast, and that was the end of the conversation.

Eli did not bring it up again. He did not give me advice. He had said what he had to say and he let me sit with it — which is a thing that men of Eli's generation know how to do, and that men of my generation, in the world I come from, mostly don't.

Linda and I drove home on Sunday.

I took the long way through Reading.

We talked the whole drive.

I did not say anything to her about the conversation with Eli. I was not ready.

The Monday after we got back, I sat down at the kitchen table after work and started, for the first time in three years, actually paying attention to my own body.

I started where it made sense to me to start.

With reading.

I am sixty-three. I have spent twenty-six years running an HVAC company. I am not a man who jumps at the first thing he reads on the internet.

I read for three weeks. In the evenings, on the couch, with the dog at my feet, the way you read about something when you are taking it seriously.

I had heard about beetroot for years — at the diner, in the magazines Linda brings home from the grocery store, in the back of a newspaper health section I usually skipped past. I had never really looked into it.

I started there.

I read about the deep crimson pigment in beetroot. It is called betalain — the color that stains everything for two days. I read about the dietary nitrates that are naturally present in the root.

I read about the long, patient relationship the research community has had with this vegetable for decades, in the context of cardiovascular wellness and supporting healthy circulation.

None of what I read was a fireworks story.

It was the opposite of one.

It was a careful body of evidence, slowly built, by careful people who were not making outlandish claims.

I told Linda, somewhere in the middle of that three weeks, that I was reading about it.

I told her I was thinking about adding one small thing to what I was already doing in the mornings.

I told her about Eli on the porch, and the horse.

I had not told her any of what I had been carrying before that conversation. I should have told her years earlier. That is on me.

She listened the way she listens — without performance and without judgment — and at the end of it she said: thank you for telling me. What do you want to do?

I told her I wanted to think for another week or so.

She said okay.

After that week, I picked one of the brands I had read about.

A small company called Rosabella.

I picked it for one specific reason.

The betalain pigment 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.

The people at Rosabella decided to cold-press the root at low temperatures because they wanted 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 tells you something about who is running the operation.

The other thing I liked was the simplicity of it. Two capsules in the morning with a glass of water.

I am sixty-three and I have a job and a wife and a yard and four grandchildren under the age of nine. I am not interested in a protocol that requires its own shelf.

Before I started, I did something I want to tell you about clearly, because it is the most important thing in this letter.

I have been on a low-dose blood pressure medication for six years. A low-dose cholesterol medication for four.

I would not add anything new to what I was already taking without asking somebody who would know whether the new thing played safely with the old things.

So I called my pharmacist — the man at the counter at the pharmacy where I have been filling my prescriptions for nine years.

I told him what I was thinking about adding. I asked him plainly whether there was any reason not to, given what I was already on.

He pulled up my profile, looked at the medications and the dosages, and told me he had no concerns about adding beetroot in capsule form to what I was already taking.

He told me to keep doing what I was doing on the medication side. He told me not to change anything about the prescriptions without my doctor in the loop. He told me to call him again, or call my doctor's office, if I had any questions.

I want to say something now that I am going to say several times before this letter is over, because it is the only thing in this letter that matters more than anything else.

Whatever your doctor has you on, stay on.

Call your pharmacist or your doctor's office and ask before you add anything new.

Do not, under any circumstances, change a prescription on your own on the basis of what some man in Pennsylvania wrote in a letter you found on the internet.

Call somebody who knows what is on your chart. The two minutes it takes to ask are worth every second.

I was adding it to what I was already doing. Not stopping the blood pressure medication. Not stopping the cholesterol medication. Not changing anything else.

I started on a Tuesday.

I picked Tuesday because Monday felt like too much pressure.

The first two weeks, I felt nothing in particular.

I want to tell you that honestly, because the temptation in a letter like this one is to pretend something dramatic happened on day three.

Nothing dramatic happened on day three.

I had read enough to know that bodies are different — some people notice something within the first week or two, some people take much longer, some people don't notice much at all — and I had braced myself for any of those outcomes.

What I noticed, I noticed slowly, in pieces I did not connect at the time.

The first thing I noticed was that I was sitting through the evening news without falling asleep in my chair.

I had been falling asleep in my chair for the better part of two years.

After a few weeks, I was making it to the end of the broadcast. Sometime in the second month, I was making it to nine o'clock.

One night, a couple of months in, Linda and I sat on the couch watching a movie together at nine-thirty on a Saturday, the way we used to fifteen years ago.

I was awake for the whole thing.

The second thing I noticed was that I was driving the long way home from Hannah's.

Linda and I went down for Thanksgiving — a few weeks after I started — and on the Sunday we drove home through Reading, the way we used to.

I had suggested it without thinking about it.

Linda had looked at me sideways from the passenger seat and not said anything.

We stopped for coffee at a diner outside Pottstown. Sat in a booth for forty-five minutes. Talked about our grandchildren and about Eli, who Linda likes a great deal, and about a small kitchen renovation Linda had been wanting to do for two years that I had been quietly putting off.

By the time we got home, we had agreed to start the renovation in the spring.

The third thing I noticed was that I was present in my marriage in a way I had not been for some time.

I noticed it in the kitchen when Linda was telling me about her day, and I did not have to ask her to repeat what she had just said.

I noticed it in the car.

I noticed it on a Saturday afternoon in February when we drove out to look at tile samples and ended up taking the long way home and stopping at a small park I had not been to in twenty years.

I noticed it in the small daily ways that a long marriage works, when both people are actually there for it.

I had stopped being there for it without realizing I had stopped.

I was there for it again.

That was the gift.

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

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

I had finally told Linda what I had been carrying.

I had taken Eli's sentence about the horse seriously enough to start paying attention to my own body the way he had described.

I had been doing the walking I had been doing inconsistently for years, and I had started doing it more consistently.

I had been protecting my sleep more carefully.

There were several things changing at once, the way there are when a man finally decides to pay attention to something he has been not paying attention to for a long time.

All I am telling you is that I added one thing to a long list of things I was already doing, kept everything else exactly the same, and a quiet stretch of months followed that had not been preceded by an equally quiet stretch of months.

That is the honest version. I would not trust anyone who gave you a cleaner one.

That is the whole story.

I am writing this letter to men who are in the gap I was in — who have noticed something has drifted in their own lives in ways they have not been able to look at directly.

I want to tell you something plainly, one time.

Take Eli's sentence seriously.

Pay attention to your own body the way you would pay attention to a horse that wasn't pulling right.

Whatever paying attention looks like in your life — talking to your wife, talking to your doctor, reading carefully, making small honest changes — start there.

The point is not Rosabella.

The point is that you stop telling yourself it is just age and start paying attention.

If, somewhere down the road, paying attention takes you toward Rosabella specifically, I want to say a few things to you carefully, because I am aware that a letter like this can be read in a hurry by a man who is in a hurry to feel like himself again.

I do not know you. I do not know your bloodwork or your medications.

Bodies are different. Some men notice something within the first week or two of adding something like this. Some men take much longer. Some men don't notice much at all.

That is the honest version, and anyone offering you a cleaner one is selling you harder than I am.

Here is how Linda and I think about Rosabella now, in the words we 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 one small thing you add to the long list of things you are already doing for yourself.

Please — and I really do mean this, I am not saying it because somebody told me to — call your pharmacist or your doctor's office before you add it.

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

The people who know what is on your chart will tell you in two minutes whether it makes sense for you to add.

I am a sixty-three-year-old man who spent a weekend on an Old Order Mennonite farm and finally started paying attention. I am not the person to ask. Your pharmacist or your 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 your 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, which means 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.

— George

P.S. I want to come back to the cold-press for a second, because I rushed past it. The betalain pigment — the deep red, the part the research community keeps circling back to — is heat-sensitive. 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 and time. They made the choice anyway. That was a piece of why I picked them.

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 door. I keep the bottle on the counter next to the coffee pot. Linda keeps the coffee pot full. That is the rhythm of our morning at sixty-three and at sixty-one and we have earned a simple one.

P.P.P.S. I am going to say it one more time, because I have to. Please. Whatever you take away from this letter, take this. Call your pharmacist or your doctor's office before you add anything new to what you are already taking, especially if you are on anything for blood pressure or cholesterol or anything cardiovascular. They have your 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 worth every second.

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 your numbers, not about how you feel. If you tried it and you are not satisfied, you are not satisfied, and they send the money back. That is the whole policy and it is 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 Eli said to me on the porch — the body is the land you live on, George. Tend it — has been with me every day since. I do not farm. I do not pretend to. I have an HVAC business and a yard with a small vegetable patch that Linda planted twelve years ago. But the sentence was not about farming. The sentence was about paying attention to your own body the way you would pay attention to a horse that wasn't pulling right. I had not been paying that kind of attention. I am now. I do not know what the equivalent of that sentence is in your life. But I hope you find it. And I hope, somewhere down the road, you find yourself in a moment with the person you love where you are more there than you have been in a long time, and that you know it when you are. I hope that for you. That is the whole reason I wrote this letter.

— G.

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.
