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A Woman I Sat Next to on a Six-Hour Flight Told Me Something Between Detroit and Phoenix That I Have Not Stopped Thinking About. I was supposed to sit by myself. I had paid the extra forty dollars for the window seat in the exit row precisely so that I could sit by myself. I had a book. I had my noise-canceling headphones. I had a small bag of almonds and a bottle of water and absolutely no intention of speaking to a single human being for the next six hours. She sat down in the aisle seat at boarding. The middle seat between us stayed empty the whole flight. I want to tell you what she said to me somewhere over Kansas, because it has been four months and I still think about it most days. I am sixty-two years old. I have been a high school English teacher for thirty-four years. I have raised two children. I have buried both of my parents. I have run two half-marathons in my fifties. I am not a fragile woman. I am not a woman who collapses easily, or complains easily, or makes a fuss about how she is feeling. But I will tell you what I am. I am tired. I have been tired in a way that I cannot quite name for about the last four years. Not sleepy-tired. Not stayed-up-too-late tired. A kind of tired where you sleep nine hours and wake up at six in the morning and lie in bed for ten minutes trying to remember what the point of getting up is. Not depressed. I want to be careful about that word. I am not depressed. I am just — running on a smaller battery than I used to run on. I get to school by seven thirty. I teach four periods. I eat my lunch at my desk because the energy required to walk to the teachers' lounge and have a conversation feels disproportionate to the reward. I drive home at three thirty. By four fifteen, I am on the couch. Not on purpose. Not because I planned to be there. Just because I sat down for a minute and the minute became forty minutes and then it became an hour and a half. My husband comes home at six. He is a kind man. He has noticed. He does not say anything. But he has started doing the dishes more often. He has started making dinner on weeknights. He has noticed. I have noticed him noticing. That is one of the worst parts. I have been to my doctor about this. Three times in three years. I have had every test you can have. Thyroid panel. Iron. B12. Vitamin D. Cortisol. The full hormone workup. The sleep study where they hook you up to seventeen wires and watch you try to sleep in a stranger's bed. Everything has come back fine. My doctor — a man I have been seeing for eleven years, a kind man, a careful man — has sat me down each time and told me, gently, that everything looks great. That sometimes this happens. That perimenopause and menopause and post-menopause can do this. That my body is adjusting. He has been right, I am sure, in some larger sense. But there is a difference between knowing your body is adjusting and feeling like a stranger in it. I have been feeling like a stranger in it for four years. I had given up on the medical system finding an answer for me. I had decided that this was just the next chapter of being a woman in her sixties and that I should be grateful I was healthy enough not to be in active treatment for anything, and I should stop complaining, and I should get on with my life. I had been telling myself that for about a year when I got on the plane to Phoenix. I was flying to Phoenix to visit my sister. She had just had a knee replacement. I was going for four days to help her. I had taken a Friday off school. I had packed a small bag. I had splurged on the exit row window seat so I could read in peace. The flight was Detroit to Phoenix. Six hours, roughly. She sat down in the aisle seat. I looked up briefly to say hello, the way you do, and went back to my book. She did the same. She was a small woman, maybe in her late seventies. White hair in a neat short cut. Reading glasses. She had brought her own book too — a paperback, well-worn, the kind of book that has been read on a lot of airplanes. We did not speak for the first hour. Then the drink cart came through. She ordered a ginger ale. I ordered a black coffee. The flight attendant moved on. The woman next to me opened her ginger ale, took a sip, set it down on her tray, and said: "I haven't been able to drink coffee in eighteen years. The smell is the most beautiful smell on an airplane." I laughed. It was the first thing she had said to me, and it was charming, and I was off guard. We started talking. Her name was Helen. She was seventy-eight years old. She had been a labor and delivery nurse for forty-one years. She had retired at sixty-seven. She had been married for fifty-three years to a man named George who had died three years ago. She was flying to Phoenix to visit her granddaughter, who had just had her first baby. I told her I was a high school English teacher. I told her I was going to visit my sister after a knee replacement. We talked about books for a while. She had read everything. She mentioned five novels I had been meaning to read for a decade. She was the kind of woman you wanted to keep talking to. Somewhere around hour three, the conversation drifted, the way conversations do on long flights, into more personal places. She asked me how I was doing. Not the surface version. The real version. She asked me the way nurses ask. The way women who have spent forty years watching other women try to be okay ask. I do not know why I told her the truth. I think it was the altitude. I think it was the fact that I was never going to see her again. I think it was that she had just spent twenty minutes being interesting and curious and warm with me and I had nothing to give back except a lie or the truth. I gave her the truth. I told her about the four years of tired. The couch at four fifteen. The husband doing the dishes. The lying in bed at six in the morning trying to remember the point of getting up. I told her about every test that had come back fine. I told her about the doctor patting my hand and telling me my body was adjusting. I told her I had stopped going back about it because there was nothing left to test. She listened to the whole thing without interrupting me. When I was done, she folded down the corner of her paperback page and closed the book and set it on her tray. She turned in her seat so she was facing me as much as a person can face someone in an airline seat. She said: "Can I tell you something? You don't have to do anything with it. I am a stranger on an airplane. But I want to tell you." I said yes. She said: "I'm seventy-eight years old. I was a labor and delivery nurse for forty-one years. I retired eleven years ago." "For about the last twelve of my working years, I was tired the way you're describing. Not sick-tired. Not depressed. Just running on a smaller battery." "I had every test you can have. I had two doctors I respected and one I switched away from because he kept telling me to lose weight, which was not relevant to anything I was describing." "I had decided, around your age, that this was simply what being a woman in her sixties was going to feel like." She paused. She said: "I want to tell you what changed for me. Not because I'm telling you it'll change for you. We're different people. Different bodies. Different stories." "But you've been honest with me for the last hour. So I'm going to be honest with you." She told me. She said about two years before she retired, she had gone to a continuing-education conference in Pittsburgh. A weekend conference for nurses. She had gone mostly for the recertification credits. At lunch on the second day, she had sat down next to a woman she did not know — a woman who turned out to be a hospice nurse in her mid-sixties, vibrant, sharp, the kind of older woman who clearly still had something live running inside her. They had talked about being tired. This other nurse had told her something Helen had never forgotten. She had said: "There is a layer of the body that conventional medicine doesn't really test for and doesn't really speak to. The body's natural cellular energy systems. The body's natural antioxidant balance. These things slow down with age. They slow down for everyone. They aren't a disease. They aren't a deficiency on a standard panel. They're just a layer that quietly stops being supported the way it was when you were thirty." The hospice nurse had said: "Most of what conventional medicine tests for is dramatic. Things that are broken. Things that are out of range. The slow dimming of the cellular energy layer is not a thing that shows up dramatically. It's a thing that shows up as a woman on a couch at four fifteen." Helen looked at me when she said this. She said: "Those were her exact words. I have never forgotten them. I have repeated them to a lot of women over the years. Most of them never did anything about it. Some of them did. I'm going to tell you what I did." She told me the hospice nurse had recommended she look into beetroot. Specifically, into the active compound in beetroot — the betalains, the deep crimson pigment in the root — which she said had been studied for decades for its role in supporting the body's natural antioxidant balance and the body's natural cellular energy systems. Helen told me she had gone home from that conference and read about it for two weeks. She had eventually settled on a small company called Rosabella. She said: "I tried other beetroot supplements before I settled on Rosabella. I'm not going to say anything bad about anyone else's product. I'll just tell you what made me choose this one." "The active part of beetroot — those deep red pigments — is delicate. Cold-pressing at low temperatures preserves it. Rosabella does that. The capsules are a deep, dark crimson when you open the bottle. That color is the active compound, intact. That's what told me I'd found what I was looking for." She told me she had brought the bottle to her doctor before she started taking it. She told her doctor what it was and asked whether it would conflict with anything else she was doing. Her doctor had said it was a sensible thing to add. Good research on antioxidant support. Add it to what she was already doing. Helen had started taking it. She said: "I'm not going to make any dramatic claims. I'm a nurse. I don't make dramatic claims. I'll tell you what I noticed." "About eight weeks in, I drove home from a twelve-hour labor and delivery shift and walked into my kitchen and started cooking dinner. I had not cooked dinner after a twelve-hour shift in five years. My husband had been making me a sandwich and putting me on the couch for five years." "I didn't even realize I'd done it until he came in from the garage and looked at me and said, what are you doing." "I said, I'm making dinner." "He sat down at the kitchen table and watched me, and he did not say anything, but I could see in his face that he was working something out." Helen looked at me on the airplane. She said: "I'm seventy-eight. I retired eleven years ago. I take the same supplement now that I started taking sixteen years ago in 2009. My husband took it for the last ten years of his life and the doctors who cared for him in his final weeks said he had the cardiovascular system of a much younger man." "I am not making a claim. I am telling you the story of a marriage." She unfolded the corner of her paperback page. She picked up her ginger ale. She said: "I won't bring it up again. You have my permission to ignore everything I just said. I just thought, if I were you, I would want someone to tell me." She went back to reading her book. We did not speak much for the rest of the flight. She read. I read. We exchanged pleasantries when the meal cart came through. When the plane landed in Phoenix and we were waiting for the seatbelt sign to go off, I turned to her. I said: "Helen. What was the name again." She wrote it down on a napkin from her seat pocket. Rosabella. She handed it to me. She said: "If you decide to try it, talk to your doctor first. Promise me you'll do that." I promised her. We got off the plane. We walked to baggage claim together. We hugged. I have never seen her again. I do not know if I ever will. I am going to skip the part of this story where I sat in my sister's guest room in Phoenix that night and read about beetroot until midnight. Here is the short version. Beetroot is one of the more researched ingredients in the cardiovascular wellness category. It has been studied for decades. Its active compound — the betalains, the deep crimson pigment in the root — supports the body's natural antioxidant balance and supports the body's natural cellular energy. What I learned about Rosabella specifically is what Helen had told me on the plane. They cold-press their beetroot at low temperatures, which preserves the betalains. The capsules in the photos were the same deep, dark crimson Helen had described. That color is the betalains. That color is what tells you the active compound made it through the processing intact. It supports the body's natural antioxidant defenses. It supports the body's natural cellular energy. It supports healthy circulation. None of those are replacements for anything I had been doing. They are support for a layer my body had been quietly waiting for that the seventeen-wire sleep study and the full hormone panel had not been able to address. I came home from Phoenix on a Tuesday. On Wednesday morning, I called my doctor's office. I told the nurse I was thinking about adding a beetroot supplement called Rosabella, and I wanted to make sure my doctor was comfortable with it before I started. The nurse called back that afternoon. She said: "Dr. Hartley says it is a sensible thing to add. There is good research on antioxidant support for cardiovascular wellness. Add it to what you are already doing. Don't change anything else. We'll check in at your next visit." I ordered my first bottle that evening. I started taking it the following Monday. Two capsules with a glass of water in the morning. I did not change anything else. I want to tell you what I noticed over the next eight weeks. Not to make any claim. Just because it is the part you would want to know. The first thing was the couch. The four-fifteen couch had been a feature of my life for four years. It had been so reliable that I had structured my afternoons around it. Around week two, I came home from school on a Thursday, set my bag down, started unloading the dishwasher, and was still unloading it when my husband walked in the door at six. I had not sat down once. He walked into the kitchen and watched me for a moment. He said: "You okay?" I said: "I'm fine. Why?" He said: "You're standing up." We both stood there for a moment, holding that small piece of information between us. Then he started helping me unload the dishwasher. Around week three, I went for a walk around our neighborhood after dinner. By myself. Twenty-five minutes. I had not done that in three years. Around week four, I called my sister in Phoenix on a Sunday at five in the evening and we talked for an hour and twenty minutes. I did not need to lie down afterward. Around week five, I started reading a book again. I had stopped reading for pleasure about three years ago. I'd been telling myself I was just busy. I had not been busy. I had been too tired to hold the thread of a sentence across a page. The book I started was one of the five Helen had recommended on the plane. Around week six, I stayed after school to help a student with an essay. I had not stayed late by choice in four years. I had been getting out of that parking lot at three thirty-one for four years like a woman fleeing a building on fire. That Tuesday, I sat with a kid named Marcus for forty minutes while he worked through his thesis on The Great Gatsby. When I got home that night, my husband asked why I was late. I said: "I was helping a student." He looked at me. He said: "I have been waiting four years for you to say that sentence." I cried at the kitchen table. He sat down with me and held my hand and did not say anything else. I had my annual physical last month. Dr. Hartley went through the bloodwork. Took the blood pressure. Listened to the heart. He sat down across from me. He said: "Everything looks great." I said: "It always has, Dr. Hartley. That has not been the issue." He smiled at me. He set his tablet down. He said: "How are you actually feeling?" I told him. About the dishwasher. About the walks. About Marcus and The Great Gatsby. He listened to all of it. He said: "I am very glad to hear that. Keep up with everything you're doing." He did not bring up anything else. Neither did I. I want to be careful here. I am not a doctor. I am not in healthcare. I am one sixty-two-year-old woman who sat next to a stranger on a six-hour flight to Phoenix in June and got told something I had needed someone to tell me for four years. I do not know for certain that the Rosabella was responsible for what changed. I know what I was doing before. I know what I added. I know what has happened in the four months since. I know the timing. I also know I am sixty-two, and there will come a day when no supplement will hold back the slow turning of the years. I am not pretending otherwise. What I am telling you is what I tried. What I noticed. What my doctor said about it. That is all. If you are a woman — or a man — who has been running on a smaller battery for years and has been told by every test that everything looks fine, here is what I would say. Talk to your doctor. Tell them you are thinking about adding it. Get their blessing. Then add it to what is already working. Do not subtract anything. Do not change anything else. Give it a few weeks before you decide anything. Bodies are different. Some people notice something shift in the first week or two. Others take longer. That is the whole story. P.S. I do not know how to find Helen. I have her first name and her age and the fact that she had a granddaughter in Phoenix who had just had her first baby in June. I have searched. I have not found her. I keep meaning to write her a letter and mail it to "Helen, somewhere in Michigan, who flew Detroit to Phoenix on a Friday in June" and hope that the universe is the kind of place where letters like that find the people they are meant for. If you are reading this and you happen to be a seventy-eight-year-old retired labor and delivery nurse who once told a stranger about beetroot somewhere over Kansas — thank you. You did for me what your hospice nurse did for you in Pittsburgh. I am trying to do it for someone else now. P.P.S. Here is what I would tell you to do if you are thinking about trying it. Check with your doctor or pharmacist first. That is the most important step. Then take two capsules with a glass of water in the morning. Do not change anything else. Just add this. Give it a few weeks before you decide anything. Some people notice something within the first week or two — a little more energy through the afternoon, a little more of themselves through the back half of the day, a little less of that running-on-fumes feeling at four o'clock. Others take longer. Be patient with your body. P.P.P.S. Rosabella has a 90-day money-back guarantee. If you are not satisfied for any reason, every penny back. No questions asked. That is a sensible policy for a supplement. It gives you time to actually see whether it helps. P.P.P.P.S. Rosabella is a small operation. They harvest and bottle on their own schedule. I keep an extra bottle in the house just in case. My husband started taking it last month. He called his doctor first. His doctor said the same thing my doctor had said. Sensible thing to add. He has not said much about it. Yesterday morning he was up at five thirty. He made coffee. He read the paper at the kitchen table. When I came down at six fifteen, he looked up at me and smiled and said: "Good morning, beautiful." He has not called me beautiful in the morning in I do not know how many years. I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down across from him and we read the paper together for forty minutes before either of us had to leave for the day. That is what I am telling you about. Not the test result. The forty minutes at the kitchen table. https://track.tryrosabella.com/14309c20-4d60-44e3-9565-5ba6bb358986 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.